Rated: 80% (2 votes)
Loading ...Reznor and Yorke, the Rock Dealers
khenry
Two albums this year were made attractive the online way. Trent “Nine Inch Nails” Reznor used the internet to stream the whole Year Zero album and get fans and newcomers hooked. Then like every good drug dealer, he took away the taster from his site and left people hungry for the fix. I lasted about two weeks before buying the CD and it didn’t even occur to me to stream the music and copy it. As if that wasn’t enough, he proceeded to appeal for remixes via the internet and a fan site packaged up the best ones which didn’t make it onto the official remix CD into a single download. Shame he proceeded to pull a Morrissey and break up the band but at least it’s not just British bands that split upon their best work to date.
Meanwhile, I’m listening to In Rainbows by Radiohead for which buyers were given the online equivalent of those honesty boxes you find for newspapers in the railway outlets of WH Smith when you haven’t got time to queue up, the ones you could easily just put copper coins into instead of the full 50p. I paid £7.89 for the first copy but it’s actually a great online gift to download and burn for Christmas if you don’t want to buy the XL-signed CD version out later - or if you want a gift for a mate in another country and don’t want the hassle of physical postage by a certain time this month nor reliance on Royal Mail.
There was sniping about the latter album’s sound quality but I burned the 160K MP3s to CD-R through Windows Media Player and through my 8 year old CD player and 10 year old amp, there’s 3-5 seconds of one track which betray the encoding - the rest of the 43 minute album sounds great. Choosing to pay a graduated scale of whatever you wanted ranging from absolutely nothing, 45/46 pence (credit card fee and a token penny) or the full £40 for vinyl and CD together hadn’t been done before and though fans will want the CD for completion purposes, it’s great to see out-of-contract rockers going truly independent and giving buyers a choice.
Of course, that didn’t stop hardcore pirates torrenting an essentially free album under the excuse of sound quality, but that’s life. I previously only owned Kid A and Talk Show Host from the Romeo and Juliet 96 soundtrack, but now I want all the other Radiohead albums, so the experiment’s worked in my case. Now back to Good Soldier and Vessel…
This “free” album thing is getting rather annoying as everyone seems to want to do it now.
Wasn’t it just a short while ago artists where moaning they couldn’t afford their now Hummer H3 Golden Cock special.
The idea of a “taster” of the album is good. Serj Tankian did similar with his Elect the Dead but whats the point? I though radio stations where meant to give the taster then you bought the album and listen to it very loudly till your ears bleed. Now it’s all digital, you give up a sum of money for some data that if your unlucky you can’t do much with. No to say digital distro is bad but when the taster is the full album you might get sick of it before you bought it leaving only hardcore fans buying the CD.
But that could all just be me being a cheap miserable git.
Oh well.