Radiohead In Rainbows

Radiohead has been in the news quite a bit recently because this album was released on their website with the option to pay whatever you wanted for it. Although they did not release a lot of information about what people paid for the album I guess they sold/gave away a lot of copies. What I thought was really amazing was that when they released it in stores it debuted at #1. One would think that would be a lesson the record industry that it is not about people sharing music and getting it for free, it is about people not putting out good records, or at least popular records. Are people downloading music they would have previously bought? For sure, and certainly some people (myself included) don’t buy physical CDs anymore so there is little motivation to go out to a store to buy a CD if you have already acquired a free copy of it. But I think there are things the record companies could do to offset this. For example how about a lifetime license, so say your ipod breaks and your hard drive crashes. Well if I bought something from iTunes how about making that available to me any time I want. That would also be cool when I am traveling. Or even better how about I can log into iTunes and listen to my music anywhere? And even better how about if you come out with a remastered version I could have paid an extra buck on the original album to rights to all future re-isssues? Anyhow just some thought about what the stupid record companies to do to encourage people to buy music instead of engaging in a futile war to try to discourage people from sharing.

I am not a big Radiohead fan (never heard a Radiohead album before). I will say I was pretty disappointed to see the packaging for the album when it was released. I thought it would have been really cool to just package it like it had been downloaded and ripped to CD. The album was pretty good, another one for me where I know it is good, but I am not that crazy about it. I probably will try to give it one more listen but I don’t expect it to make the regular rotation for me. 7.5 out of 11.8.