Coldplay: "We're rich, beyotch!"

The growing consensus in the music business these days is that the money is now in touring, and that recorded music will continue to lose value. Big shots like NIN and Radiohead are giving away whole albums for free, and a number of notable other are dipping toes into the same pool...a track at a time. Coldplay, for example, gave away "Violet Hill" from their upcoming Viva La Vida for a week. It's pretty good.

But if the money's in touring, then why is Coldplay also giving away every single ticket to their upcoming shows at Madison Square Garden (click here) and Brixton Academy (click here)? Simple. Because they're rich.

Radiohead get into the remix game...charge for "stems"

In honor of this week's release of "Nude" as a single, Radiohead are making the "stems" (drums, vocals, guitar, bass, strings/fx/misc.) available for your remixing pleasure. But...you have to buy them. All five of them. From iTunes. In iTunes Plus format. What, no FLAC?

Anyway, once you've purchased the song stems, you're free to remix it as you please, and you can create a widget for your Facebook or MySpace page to encourage your friends to vote for your remix. Popular ones end up here, where they awkwardly load forever and don't play, because Radiohead apparently hasn't learned their lesson yet about bandwidth. Ah well.

Radiohead does something rad

Didn't I call this? I totally called this.

inrainbows.com

I kinda called this.

If I were a record company executive, I would not be sleeping so well tonight. But I'm not, and I just paid exactly 1 pence (plus 45 other pence) for the new Radiohead record. I'll sleep very well indeed.

Hey Radiohead: You can't possibly beat 'em. So join 'em.

So the new Radiohead record is done. What's exciting about this isn't that they used a choir of kids for something probably creepy. Or that the album will almost definitely be fucking awesome. Ok, I guess those two things are kinda exciting too.

But what's really exciting to me is that the band is currently without record label. Their EMI commitment is up. From the Paste article linked above:

"We just had a meeting about that today," said Greenwood on September 7. "We’re very relieved to have finished recording, now we have to decide what we should do with it."

Radiohead completed its six-album contract with EMI with 2003’s Hail to the Thief and is currently unsigned. Can anyone say bidding war?

Well Paste, I'm sure there are plenty of willing bidders. But I'll tell you what would really kick the ass of the music industry. What would and reach more ears and eyes than any record company's marketing team could ever dream to reach.

GIVE THE RECORD AWAY.

Thom & Co. don't need the record revenue. They'll make a king's ransom on the tour even if the record is nothing but a 48 minute fart. And they should go even further than Prince did. Distribute it online: torrents and zip files. Give the downloader his choice: mp3, flac, wav, or ogg. And release it now, right after announcing it, like Steve Jobs does.

And sure, still sell a physical disc if you really want to. Plenty of people will pay for the souvenir artwork, which Radiohead has always done right.

Basically, make it available to people the way they're going to get it anyway. If they want to buy it from a record store, encourage that. But if they want to torrent it (and let's face it, they're going to torrent it if they want to), encourage that too.

Hey! Nigel! Leave those kids alone!

Colin Greenwood and Nigel Godrich took a page from Pink Floyd's book (and so many others) when they went on a field trip in March to the Matrix Music School to record something with a 30 or so kids that will presumably end up on the next Radiohead album. A bunch more pictures at the school's website.

Stereogum likes OK Computer...a lot.

Stereogum just announced the completion of the previously unannounced OK X: A Tribute to OK Computer. Basically, when Stereogum says "Jump," bands ask "how high?" And when Stereogum says "cover Radiohead to commemorate the 10th anniversary of OK Computer," bands say "OK! (heh.)"

The compilation is, of course, a free download and cool from start to finish. Go to Stereogum for the whole deal, but here are direct links to the covers of my two OK Computer favorites:

The Twilight Sad - Climbing Up The Walls
My Brightest Diamond - Lucky

Wonder if any record label folks are panicking that a blog managed to do such a good job putting something like this together, and is now giving it away for free, no strings attached. Wonder if this makes anyone rethink their business model.