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Radiohead, “Name Your Own Price,” and (Not) Subverting the Dominant Paradigm!

October 15, 2007 in art, music, the tubes | 1 comment

Radiohead is selling their new album, “In Rainbows,” on their website. They found themselves recently out of their six-album contract with EMI Music, so for their seventh studio album they decided to self-produce and offer it on their website in two distinct formats: a “Discbox” version for £40 featuring more goodies than something filled to the brim with goodies, and a “Name Your Own Price” version of just the songs, in DRM-free (read: transferable, play-anywhere) MP3 format. You, the consumer/techno-savvy nethead/Radiohead geek, get to name your price – all the way down to £0, or in other words, free. If this sounds like a revolutionary way to provide music, then you should know that you’re not alone: some places are heralding Radiohead’s “name your own price” strategy as “yet another challenge to the music business,” and/or “the opening salvo in the all-out war for the future of the music industry.”

I was curious upon first hearing about this. After dealing with a decade of formatwars, DRM, “music rights,” and the ubiquity of illegal music downloads, it seems like a novel idea: have people pay what they want to pay for music they want to hear. How democratic. How egalitarian. How revolutionary. People who were going to download the album illegally anyways now have a legit* means to do so, and fans of Radiohead (or fans of providing some sort of compensation to Radiohead) can pay however much they think the album is worth.

But, then, while walking home (and listening to my Ipod), there are a lot of things I had to wonder. What audience is being targeted for this new album? What assumptions could I safely make about audience requirements? Who isn’t included in this, but might want to be?

Well, the short life of requirements I came up with, after paying** for the album:

1. You must have access to a computer
2. You must be able to download the entire 50MB album
3. You need to have a computer capable of playing the music
4. If you want to transport your music, you need to have a way to do that as well (flashdrives, CD, DVD, webspace, pushsites, etc.)
5. If you pay any amount, you must have an acceptable credit card
6. You need to register with the website, which includes email, address, name, and mobile phone #

Upon reflection, that’s a pretty limiting set of traits in order to download an album. Given that there was no national announcement – “Radiohead! New album! You can get it for free!,” I imagine most people who have heard about this offer read up on technoblag or music sites, or are a fan of Radiohead. If you don’t like them (or have never heard of them), why even bother downloading it, right? And given the distribution of computer and web access around the world (usually called the digital divide, although I like to call it the continuation of oppression), the audience is probably Radiohead listeners, music aficionados, and people with significant computer access and know-how. No FAQ about the music, downloading, or listening is provided, so it’s safe to assume that they think you know all the necessary steps to listen to their aural delights.

And then, the clincher: Radiohead wants you to buy their CD. For money. Really. They are offering it in this manner to pay for the CD, and cut out the producer/distributor from the equation. So, if you’re a Radiohead fan, give them money. If you’re not, but you just want to listen to the music, give them money. They want you to. And, from reading that most of the people who have paid for the album paid £4 on average, they’ve made a cool £4.8 million already.

That’s not revolutionary. Hell, it’s not even an “opening salvo” in an us-versus-them, David-and-Goliath music biz war, or “yet another challenge” to the music industry. It’s another way to distribute their songs and earn money from them. A real challenge would be to offer music for free, in any format, without copy protection, and not attach it to a “shopping cart” where you have to offer up a price – a tactic which, I am assuming, is designed to get you to think about how much you’re cheating them if you grab it for free.

* Provided certain requirements are met
** I paid £1.45 for “In Rainbow” – roughly $3.

Musical Interpretation

May 19, 2007 in art, music | 2 comments

From “Theories, Problems and Suggestions,” The Music of Our Lives, by Kathleen Marie Higgins:

Generalizing to the broader spectrum of musical experience, Feld insists that such nontechnical metaphorical vocabularies are not indications of verbal incompetence. Instead, they point to shared features of musical experience that we all, in practice, recognize:

“When people say “it’s different from…”, “it’s kind of…”, “it sort of reminds me of…”, and things of this sort, they are creating discourse organizations that has locational, categorical, and associational features. When they say, “Well, if I had to name it… I mean… on some level,… for me at least,… you know, I really can’t say but do you know what I mean?…” they are not just tongue-tied, inarticulate, or unable to speak. They are caught in a moment of interpretive time, trying to force awareness to words. They are telling us how much they assume that we understand exactly what they are experiencing. In fact, we do understand exactly what they are experiencing. We take it as socially typical that people can talk this way about music, stringing together expressives, and we assume that this confirms what we are all supposed to know: that at some level, one just cannot say with words what music says without them.

Like, for instance, trying to describe coffee to someone who has never tasted it. Bitter? Earthy? Like dirt? It makes sense only in a (shared or unshared) context.

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