Sam's World Of No

Radiohead’s announcement that people downloading their new album would name their price was unusual, but it wasn’t revolutionary. Many commentators have suggested that this meant that their album was free - in fact, this would have been a much more run-of-the-mill announcement. Free music is nothing new - putting aside piracy and the associated and ridiculous lawsuits, every popular musical outfit in the world has a MySpace page where the vast majority of them allow visitors to listen to full versions of songs. Some bands even take it further and, prior to the album release, put their entire album on MySpace for streaming, for free, for anyone. No pre-registration, no nothing. These aren’t small bands - granted they are not the size of Radiohead, but Bloc Party are a pretty serious commercial venture in the UK. People who know what they are doing have worked out, finally, that the whole idea that people wanted to listen to albums before they bought them wasn’t just an excuse for piracy - it was the truth. Bloc Party reached #2 in the UK with the album in question, Weekend in the City.

Smaller artists and unsigned artists, myself included, are even greater advocates of free music - Harvey Danger, for example, were not that unusual in their release last year, although it was one of the first times I personally had come across such a well-produced album for free - for them, their music is the medium by which they get known - it’s the way they get gigs.

Record companies have added a middleman to this process, and added value to the recorded music itself where, for each artist’s own individual chronology, previously there was none. It’s been a fun and profitable ride for them, but as I’m sure the formers printers of sheet music can attest, things move on.

So free music is nothing new. But what people seem to be forgetting is that Radiohead are not giving the album away for free - they are asking you to set your own price, they are making you perform a value judgement on their work. This is a massive difference, and I hope that soon they will release some figures about how much people chose to pay. Initial indications are that most people created a price that was around what they would normally pay for a CD or iTunes DRM-free download. Because you are valuing the work, the people who paid nothing - or worse, the people who paid 1 penny but got hit with the 45p transaction fee - are essentially saying that the new album from one of the world’s top artists is worthless.

Certainly, that is what one BBC philistine has implied with his rambling set of words put together onto a page that resembles an article. Frankly, anybody that considers Pablo Honey to be their best work is totally missing the point of the musical development that Radiohead have experienced over their career. I certainly consider it to be the work of the least artistic merit - a mediocre album that showed promise, at a time where promise in UK music was scarce. I don’t think I’m alone - in fact, I know it.

For the record, the album is really good. It isn’t a massive departure from the stage that they reached with Amnesiac, in particular, but I have the feeling that they’ve finally found what they wanted to make all along. The continuity is no better illustrated than in the fact that track 3, Nude, is perhaps one of their oldest-but-never-recorded songs. If they have reached a point where they can finally make a version of something they’ve had knocking around for years that they are happy about, it sounds a lot to me like the style they have created is what they craved all along.

In my view, it’s worth the full cost of a normal retail album, and I would have happily paid £12-£14 in a music shop. As it turns out, I’m a Radiohead nut so I bought the £40 discbox. And I won’t be alone, but I won’t be in the majority of customers. That said, almost certainly, we will find that when people are asked to value a piece of work, only an insignificant minority will price it as worthless.

Of course, to get stuff for free is the logical follow through of the ’set your own price’ idea, but it’s a novelty. Perhaps this will be an important stage in the history of music, the current chapter of which almost seems to be the demise of record companies, or perhaps the unique situation that Radiohead are in (bags of money, no record company) will not be repeated. I think that both are true - I think that it is the latest in a series of high profile media events that show that DRM was a stupid idea that won’t work, that people aren’t petty thieves but music lovers, and that the internet is going to change music. And everything else. Of course, that is cliché in the extreme, but I don’t care if it means that Ash won’t be making any more albums. For those guys at least, the next logical step should be to just stop writing and releasing music entirely.

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