In Rainbows

You may be about to shout me down and accuse me of many things, but I just downloaded the new Radiohead album and paid nothing.

‘Why did you do that?’ You may say… well here is my reasoning. There was a lot of hype around Radiohead and their chosen method of distribution for their album ‘In Rainbows’ and I thought ‘that’s fantastic, they’re taking control of their art and becoming the master of their own musical and creative destiny. But what does this ablum sound like?’. I hadn’t heard any previews and to be honest the majority of their output since OK Computer has made me want to curl up into a ball and hide for a very long time.

What to do? I read their blog entries and read the articles in various publications online and off and decided to take the try before you by option. I looked at their website http://www.inrainbows.com to see if this was actually possible. Surely they wouldn’t give me the option to just download the album for free; that is exactly what they have done, those brave souls. So that is exactly what I did at 9.30 this morning and I’m listening to it now.

I’m not here to write a review on the latest Radiohead tunes but I have been pleasantly surprised. I was half expecting an even more experiemental effort than some of their last outings, perhaps an experimental release in more ways than one. I have to say that at this early stage, is shaping up to be a classic Radiohead album.

I love the fact that they have made this album available for everyone to download at the price that they feel it’s worth. I love the fact that this is a quality album and not a test of distribution with some below standard songs and I love the fact that slowly others are going to jump on this bandwagon including The Charlatans, who are releasing their next album via Xfm in a couple of weeks, and Madness, of all people, who are rumoured to be releasing their next studio album via a national sunday paper.

What am I going to do next? I’m going to log back into the Radiohead website and pay a fair price for this album. I’d liked to have been able to legitimately preview this content before buying it so I could pay the fair price before I bought it, but I do hope this is a success for Radiohead, The Charlatans and all the others who will come after.

The music industry is dead, long live the music industry.