Most of you may be familiar with In Rainbows, Radiohead’s latest album. Less of you might be familiar with how they distributed it. The first three months of the album’s availability was accessible via the internet only. Anyone could come to the albums website and download the album for whatever price they saw fit. The band hasn’t released any financial numbers on their profits from the endeavor, but financial success or not, they introduced a new method for mass distribution of music. Until the end of this month, they are experimenting again.
The have separated the song nude into five separate tracks: vocals, guitars, bass, drums, and string. Anybody has access to download these tracks and import them into whatever audio mixing software they have. People then have the ability to upload their remix to a website that users can vote on.
There is no question that the form of distribution of creativity is undertaking a massive facelift. Technology is providing a means to easily distribute material that once needed to exist and travel in the physical world, both of which are rather expensive. This change is making us re-evaluate things like copy write and distribution agencies. The ideas that Radiohead are presenting are very refreshing and are giving great insight into how we can allow creative professionals strive for a certain level of success, as well as make their products more easily accessible to their audience.
Here is the top mix so far:
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 6:59 am and is filed under design, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Go Radiohead! I don’t see why any creative wouldn’t be interested in releasing their source material to have all manner of strange remixed happen to it. It’s getting your name out there, and you are fostering a community among your peers.
The market as we have seen it develop during the last century, up to the nineties, is based on massive entities marketing their product to the masses uni-directionally. With the growing use of the internet, customers are informing each other, and thus getting empowered. There is starting to be a very limited space for middle men (record companies) to operate freely without being questioned by this new consumer.
The Stranger (Seattle free weekly magazine) had a feature on “pay what you want” venues and consumer goods. If I remember correctly, Radiohead received on average $8 for In Rainbows. Compared to the old market, where the record company acted as a middle man, reaping most of the rewards, this is almost pure profit for Radiohead.
Go Radiohead! I don’t see why any creative wouldn’t be interested in releasing their source material to have all manner of strange remixed happen to it. It’s getting your name out there, and you are fostering a community among your peers.
The market as we have seen it develop during the last century, up to the nineties, is based on massive entities marketing their product to the masses uni-directionally. With the growing use of the internet, customers are informing each other, and thus getting empowered. There is starting to be a very limited space for middle men (record companies) to operate freely without being questioned by this new consumer.
The Stranger (Seattle free weekly magazine) had a feature on “pay what you want” venues and consumer goods. If I remember correctly, Radiohead received on average $8 for In Rainbows. Compared to the old market, where the record company acted as a middle man, reaping most of the rewards, this is almost pure profit for Radiohead.
April 15th, 2008
3:43 pm