The following is an excerpt—reprinted here by permission—from Greg Kot's new book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (Scribner, $25). They being long tired of homogenized corporate radio playing the same twenty hits (Hotel California, anyone?), "it tells the story of how the laptop generation created a new grassroots music industry, with the fans and bands in charge."
Herein Radiohead reinvents the way in which it distributes music directly to its fans:
Whenever he considered the possibility of Radiohead going into business for itself, guitarist Jonny Greenwood got a little queasy. “It makes me think we’re gonna be sitting in endless business meetings talking about how to do it off our own backs, rather than sitting in studios recording music.”
But Radiohead was genuinely unsettled by what it saw as the major labels’ inability to adapt to the marketplace. The long lag time imposed by the majors between finishing an album and actually releasing it to set up a proper big-budget marketing campaign was particularly irritating. The band appreciated that its fans were almost ridiculously vigilant. As soon as word would get out that Radiohead had finished working on an album, the Internet began to buzz with anticipation. A leak of the new music would inevitably follow, and Radiohead fans were soon sharing the music and debating its merits. Inevitably, Web sites would jump in with their critiques of the still-unreleased work. It was flattering and yet frustrating for the band; increasingly, they sensed the problem was not with the fans, but with their label’s inability to keep up with how fans were consuming music.
By the fall of 2007, Radiohead had a new album ready to go, but still hadn’t pulled the trigger on any kind of record deal. It decided to release the album anyway, through its Web site. On Oct. 1, Jonny Greenwood posted a terse announcement on radiohead.com: “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days. We’ve called it In Rainbows.”
So much for the big marketing plan. In the land of the major labels, Greenwood would’ve been drummed out of the public-relations academy for his utter offhandedness. For an artist of Radiohead’s stature, it was customary for a big label to plot out the details of an album release months in advance, to line up shelf space at retail stores, programming at commercial radio, and full-page ads and interviews in Billboard, Rolling Stone, and the usual print-media suspects. But for the first time in its existence, Radiohead had no such constraints. It could now effectively function as its own record company, record store, and distribution service rolled into one—at least temporarily. So Radiohead instructed its fans that on Oct. 10, it would provide an access code to a digital download of the new album to any customer willing to part with an e-mail address.
The price was left to the customer’s discretion, the virtual equivalent of a giant tip jar.
Continued... “It’s up to you,” the checkout screen read for preordering the ten-song disc.
Do not insult Death Cab.
Also available to order was an expanded, physical version of the album, to ship two months later. Priced at the U.S. equivalent of $81, it would include an 18-track double album packaged in both CD and vinyl versions, with lyrics, artwork, and photographs in a hardback book and slipcase.
Radiohead’s distribution strategy for “In Rainbows” reduced the decade-long debate over Internet downloading to a single, deceptively simple question: “What’s this piece of music really worth to you?” It was a question that respected the intelligence of the potential buyer, a question that bristled with moral, ethical, economic, and aesthetic considerations. And yet it was a question that could be answered with a simple mouse click, in prices ranging from $0.00 to $99.99 (the order form didn’t accommodate three-digit dollar figures). It was a brilliant move made even more potent by its timing. Only a week before, a federal jury in Minnesota had awarded the record industry a $220,000 judgment against Jammie Thomas for the crime of downloading 24 copyrighted songs and making them available for file sharing. Thomas was hardly alone. At the very moment her verdict was being read, more than 9 million consumers were sharing music files around America, according to media management company BigChampagne.
As one of the more marketable names in the business, Radiohead was in a position where it didn’t have to give away anything. It had the cachet to charge $10 or more for its music, and rest assured that most of its fans would gladly pay. But it clearly wanted no part of a music industry that labels its own customers as thieves. By declaring, “It’s up to you,” Radiohead made it clear whose side it was on.
The Internet exploded with Radiohead-related chatter. In the three days after the announcement, blogpulse.com, a search engine that reports on daily blog activity, showed more than a 1,300 percent increase in the number of posts mentioning the band.
The behind-the-scenes mechanics of the deal were intriguing, all the more so because Radiohead really wasn’t interested in talking about them—perhaps because it might’ve appeared unseemly to gloat. The band stood to profit handsomely from any paid download. What’s more, they didn’t have to share the money with any middlemen.
Journalist Greg Kot, whose previous work includes Wilco—Learning How To Die, writes a blog for the Chicago Tribune. Read the entire Radiohead excerpt, and Greg's other posts, at Turn It Up—A guided tour through the worlds of pop, rock and rap. Floydian readers may also be interested in this earlier post about Radio Paradise, the best thing to happen to multi-genre music listening in the public realm since WABX, the station the glowed in the dark. Oh, yeah....Radio Paradise plays both Radiohead AND Death Cab For Cutie!
Since August the wife and I have been engaged in a 100% top-down remodel while we live amongst the chaos. Tearing the family room down to studs enabled me to install a 7.1 surround sound system, with in-wall speakers and cabinets furnished by Polk Audio. The fronts are Polk LSi7 series speakers, coupled with the biggest, baddest subwoofer Polk offers, the PSW505. Well, OK...it's the biggest and baddest for my price range, their PSW1000 being beyond my reach. (I did have to buy other gear, ya know!)
The star of the show, though, is the new Yamaha RX-V2700 A/V receiver with power to spare, full network capability built-in, and a USB port on its front panel. Slip in any flash drive or flash player loaded with MP3s (or WAVs, what-have-you), and the Yamaha plays them back in series or at random. Attach a large capacity external USB hard drive holding your entire collection, the drive formatted as FAT32, and you never have to fumble with another CD, cassette, or LP ever again!And just for you iPodders, Yamaha sells a compatible docking station.
The Rx-V2700 includes technology to enhance MP3s, "filling in" those lost bits heard in the original format of your songs. Couple that with 7.1 enhanced stereo (the thing is magic, I tell you) and you won't believe just how fantastic your MP3 collection sounds!
Even cooler is how, via DHCP, the Yamaha so easily found its home on my network and discovered the cable Internet connection. (No chocolate mess!) Using the adjacent TV as its display (HDMI), it's a pretty simple matter to navigate 'net radio stations located all over the world and of just about any genre. I was initially concerned that my favorites, Radio Paradise (RP) and KXJZ, would go missing but—lo' and behold—they're listed among the hundreds of choices. Even the wife got excited when I sampled a highly-listenable Christian channel this past Sunday, and she clearly enjoyed hearing The Mavericks (!) on RP tonight (that's just how eclectic RP can be).
The feature I haven't been able to test is the unit's ability to interface with my homebuilt, 1TB RAID5 media server where my MP3 collection resides. This is because the RX-V2700 doesn't support UPnP at this time (c'mon, Yamaha!), instead relying on Windows Media Connect to stream audio from my server. And, of course, the latter requires Windows XP to which I haven't yet migrated my big box. (The unopened OS package is somewhere out in the garage, a.k.a., storage central).
This blog is about music...many genres of music, as it happens, though I'm not predisposed to country nor rap. I'm a bit old-school, but you'll find my tastes are all over the place—from John Coltrane to Hoyt Axton, Roy Orbison to Vivaldi, Diana Krall to Blue Oyster Cult.
That's not to say that I don't appreciate an occasional offering from an Alan Jackson or a M.C. Hammer (like I said, I'm a bit old school), but don't expect to learn anything about the latest alt rock by reading any of this. Once in a while I may let my fondness for some group like Porcupine Tree, the Doves, or Durutti Column be known, but unless I get tipped off by (the best thing to happen to Internet radio), or by my daughter, Brooke, I don't spend much time chasing that down. Sorry. There are only so many hours in the day in which to listen.
Rather, I'm writing this blog to hopefully broaden your own audio spectrum: to perhaps turn you on to some obscure piece of music that's really going to do it for you. Like anything recorded by Yulara. But I'm getting way ahead of myself.
Along the way, I intend to provide you with some historical background—as much as I care to, that is. For example, that the record companies originally told George Benson to, as the title of an unrelated Frank Zappa recording attests, Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar. They believed that no one would ever want to hear poor George sing and, thankfully, they were very wrong.
(Though you've probably heard George's rendition of The Drifters' On Broadway by now, check out his version of Leon Russell's This Masquerade. And now that I've mentioned Leon, were you aware that it was he who penned This Diamond Ring, a big Top 40 hit for Gary Lewis & the Playboys? And yes, Gary is the son of Jerry Lewis, the goonier half [?!] of the Martin & Lewis comedy team. It turns out that, way before Joe Cocker and Mad Dogs & Englishmen, ol' Leon was a L.A. studio musician playing with the likes of some guy by the name of Glen Campbell.)
See? That's the kind of historical stuff I'm going to be weaving through this blog. Along with ideas for some really cool segues (track mixing) you probably wouldn't have ever considered. We'll talk about gear, from semi-audiophile stuff all the way down to the smallest flash-based MP3 players—though it is not my intention to compete with the likes of Sound and Vision magazine or Engadget.
And I'll relate some personal stories, such as going on a school-sanctioned field trip to see/hear Cream the first time they played Detroit in 1967. Or having Iggy Pop (aka Iggy Stooge) lick my Kodak camera lens. Or catching an early Grand Funk Railroad (subsequently forced to shorten their name to Grand Funk) at an outdoor summer festival at Mt. Holly (near Flint, MI).
But wait! Did someone mention the blues? And jazz? Zydeco? Ambient/trance/acid jazz, et al.? And a whole lot of other stuff? Writing this on a PC holding well over 27,000 processed tracks stashed on 1TB RAID5 disk array (and easily twice that many that have yet to be "processed"), I think I've got the subject covered, though I know of a couple of guys whose collections dwarf mine.
FCC-licensed, classic rock wannabe-DJ and quasi-sociohistorian, herein I ramble ad nauseum about many genres of music, the musicians, strange connections, the venues, and the gear with which to (legally) transcend wherever you happen to be.
The following is an excerpt—reprinted here by permission—from Greg Kot's new book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (Scribner, $25). They being long tired of homogenized corporate radio playing the same twenty hits (Hotel California, anyone?), "it tells the story of how the laptop generation created a new grassroots music industry, with the fans and bands in charge." 
(Though you've probably heard George's rendition of The Drifters' On Broadway by now, check out his version of Leon Russell's 
