Roll over Darwin Awards...

[Myz_Lilith]

...cos I'm now campaigning for the foundation of the Metallica Awards, given to those in the music industry who shoot themselves in the foot with a rocket launcher, by needlessly screwing over their fans.

This month's winners?

Radiohead

Now, back when I was in my impressionable teenage years, I had much love for Radiohead. They got me through many a long night of Shakespear essays and sculptic weird organic forms in the garage. Over the years that's slipped away somewhat as far as I'm concerned (I kind of think they've remembered the experimantal music and intellectual lyrics, but forgotten to add the songs in.) Nevertheless, I retain a very soft spot in my memory for them, and was therefore intrigued... and then saddened and a little sickened... as the drama of the past few weeks unfolded.

And it could all have been so good.

First came the announcement that, with no prior publicity, singles releases, interviews, whatever, Radiohead would be releasing their brand new studio album, In Rainbows, purely as a download. Oh, there would also be a CD release, but that would be a duluxe box set, pimped up full of extras and at nearly three times a regular CD price. The idea was that those who just wanted the music could legally download the album and just get the music, those that actually wanted all the physical paraphanelia would pay premium - but receive premium service as well.

And the biggest news? If you were downloading the album, YOU chose how much to pay. There was a minimum fee (administrative, the band said) of 45p, but beyond that... well, the idea was that if you wanted the album, you were on trust to pay what you thought was a fair price for it. Oh, and the download would be DRM free. This was your music, you buy it, you own it, no strings attached.

Of course, there were plenty of "in that case, they owe me fifty quid to listen to it!" jokes going round. But by and large people were pretty excited. Radiohead were "between labels". They had nobody to answer to but themsleves. Here was a major band ~finally~ in a position to attempt to come to grips with digital music, and make it work with them rather than fighting it... and they were doing it.

Or were they?

The first grumbles started to roll in almost instantly. It turned out that the downloadable album was only available as a 160kb/sec encoding. (For comparison, I think I's be right in saying that most stuff you hear on GSP is encoded at at least 190 160kb/sec - 160 isn;t ~bad~ but it is a touch low.) And remember, this isn't for a download people have picked up somewhere, it's for the official you-pay-for-it download that's being billed as the new alnum. People who purchased the download ~were~ made aware of this, but only in a snigle line of text in what looked like a standard order confirmation email. For fans unaware of the minuatae of CD ripping, this figure would mean little... especially those who usually buy their music on CD, couldn't afford the premium box set, but wanted the new album on what was being billed as the launch date. And obviously for those that did understand "kilobytes per second" and what 160 of those means in terms of music quality, this email didn't turn up until ~after~ they had decided how much to pay for their turns-out-it's-somewhat-less-than-album-quality "album". And in many cases, even for those that wanted to, there was often less than 24 hours to spot this detail and cancel the order.

So, you might ask, what's the difference? Downloads come in all kinds of qualities, and how often can anyone actually tell the difference between CD and lower quality MP3s anyway?

The first point to make here is that Radiohead create, to put it in techical terms, very wibbly music on top of wibbly music. It has lots of things doing stuff in the background, and stuff doing things in the foreground, and other bits messing around elsewhere. Or to put it another way, t's not exactly three chords and a hyperactive drummer with extra sugar rations. This is the sort of stuff that people who aren;t serious musicians call serious music. So while there's some bands where a 160kb/sec would be good enough quality for listening to whether over a computer or a sound system, and might maybe even give it a touch of raw edge, Radiohead are one of those bands where you genuinely will notice the difference, and not just claim you can to outdo your muso mates.

(And also socio-economically, the kind of people that listen to Radiohead are often likely to be the kind of people with ridiculously NASA-tech soundsystems where you can ~genuinely~ hear a mouse thinking about dropping a pin - and can certainly tell the difference in quality between a CD recoring and a mid-range encoded mp3.)

The second is that the press releases and publicity made it sound as if the downloadable album was the equivilant of a CD in evey way AND asked people to name the price they were happy to pay based on that assumption. And the sad thing is that in this case, a lot of the ones that entered into this in the spirit of generosity and trying to make it work properly, are by nature going to be the biggest fans of the group. They are going to be the ones who - rather than seeing it as an easy way to get a cheap album - seriously thought about what a "virtual album" would be worth to them, and what they thought the band should receive, and paid that gladly. Only to find out that the product they were actually receiving was of lower quality than the one they had put an honest evaluation to. The people who were doing their best to be fair to the band and make e-music pay the artist fairly are the ones most likely to have been ripped off.

Third, there wasn't the option of "well, if you want CD quality, buy the CD". The only alternative version available was the massively priced box set - great if you want all the extras but not if you just want the music at a decent quality. The just-a-CD CD isn't set to come out until early 2008. For fans that wanted to hear - and own - the music as soon as they could, that kind of wait would be a slow torture. Even so, many would have happily done both - but wouldn't have paid as much as they did for the download had they known this would be the case.

Finally, this wasn't a mistake made by rookies. All of Radiohead's previous albums had been available through more conventional purchasable download facilities encoded at 320 kb/sec. The decision to make In Rainbows available only at 160 kb/sec was a deliberate one. A suspicion began to grow that Radiohead might be less fervent than they had claimed in their embracing of digtial music in all it's possibilities.

That was pretty much confirmed when the band's management company started to talk about how the main aim of the innovative downloadable format was to *headdesk* sell more traditional CDS. "If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn't do what we are doing," Bryce Edge of Courtyard Management told Music Week, the UK's industry magazine.

So now not only are people pee'd off having forked over their hard earned cash under false pretenses - paying what they considered a fair price for a CD quality album only to find out it's a lot less than that - but they find out this was a deliberate and cynical ploy to force them to buy the album a second time round on CD. Less "let's embrace the spirit of downloadable music and make it a viable part of our commerce" and more "Okay, so we can't stop people ripping the album once it's released... so just make the gits pay for the MP3s FIRST, but make it so they also have to buy the CD anyway." This wasn't a whole new approach to the digital age of music. It was a cynical new take on the release-a-single-and-do-all-the-interviews method of hyping a CD launch.

On a personal level, I wasn't involved in any of this commotion at all. I've been unimpressed enough by their recent history that I didn't feel like paying anything out at all for a new ablm, but honest enough that I didn't want to screw up what sounded like an innovative scheme by taking advantage of it and ripping them off by grabbing it for the minimum fee. Joke's on me there, I guess... but not as much as on the people that paid. But that's not the worst of it. What ~really~ annoys me is that for years to come, any band that tries this kind of "download and pay us fairly" release is going to be viewed with cynicism and contempt. The point where across the board, just the music is purchased, without any middlemen, and with the transactions a lot more direct - and honest - between musicians and music buyers, has been punted over the horizon. Thanks a lot, Radiohead.

There are plenty of people that would have been happy to pay a minimum amount - or even a bit more - to download a full, legit, album preview, albeit a lower quality version, and then gone on to buy the CD. There are plenty of people that would have been happy to pay out a fair bit more, even close to full album price, to buy outright an album in a non-physical format, who wouldn't have minded if it was slightly less than CD quality. There's plenty of the fans that would have paid a decent price (ie not a full album price, but more than the 45p minimum) for the download AND then bought the CD next year as well.

But when you give people the impression that you're trying a new innovative scheme where people can either pay whatever they feel is right for a full quality, virtual CD, or can pay a premium for the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink collectors item... and sit back and revel in the spotlight while the whole world hails you as the future of music marketing... THEN a couple of weeks later reveal that it was all a snake-oil marketing technique for the same old same old basic CD sales as always... well, you're gonna be in everyone's black books.

At the very least this is a frightening piece of total incompetence by people that are meant to be music business vetrans... at worst, a cynical marketing ploy that ends up most hurting those that are the loyalest fans, and those that most wanted to put their money where their mouth was and support the band - and the concept of legitimate, mutually beneficial downloads - finanically.

Welcome to the Metallica Club, boys.

[Neoagent]

Disagree, totally. Loved the album, gave them $10 for it.

They paid hardly anything to produce the album other then creating the CD's and vinals, artwork and lyric book, and the money is going directly to them.

There isn't much of a different between 160/320 encoding unless you're a complete audiophile with $700 speaker configurations to even hear the minimum difference, and "CD Quality" is a bunch of bologna anyways, concidering most people don't even use CD's anymore other then to backup data.

Making all the mp3s 320 would have made the files MUCH larger, and they would have had to pay for more bandwidth that they would have had to spend profits on, when hardly anyone out there even has the equipment to even hear the difference, costing them money in the long run. This was a clear and cut good business move on there part.

Sure, I didnt order the physical album, and didn't get all the extra goodies, but what I got was some good quality mp3 format tracks (which is what I was going to convert the CD to anyways) and they were pretty decent songs too, and im not even really a big radiofan head.

Was it a perfect way to initialize a new way of directly selling music? No. But it's a start, and those money-grubbing labelists didn't get one damn penny.

[Kyrros]

Hmm, I'm game. I'm gonna throw my hat in the ring with the name Limp Bizkit on it. Language warning here, there are bad words below.

Way back in 2002 or so, Limp Bizkit started looking for a guitarist to replace Wes Borland so they went to a few cities around the world ( including Seattle and San Francisco) to hold massive grassroots auditions to find one. This was a freakin' awesome idea because some no-name guy or girl could have the potential to make it big by auditioning at one of these events and people ate it up. Literally thousands of people flew/drove/walked in to hand over demo CDs and audition for the band. Some even went to multiple events to audition a second time to increase their chances of getting in.

Each potential Bizkit (mini-Bizkit) had only 60 seconds to show their stuff in front of a few judges and then were given a pass/fail. Of course, almost everyone failed because the masses were coming to audition and for the most part the masses aren't legendary level guitarists. That's fine, when you have so many people to go through you have to be a little brutal to get it done before you die of old age.

Thing is, one of the auditioners posted anonymously about his experience in trying out for the band and a copy of that can be found Here. For those not reading the whole thing the summary is that the auditioners were not told how long they would have before the judges (ie, 60 sec) and after waiting around for up to twelve hours in a line the guy finds out that everyone has to sign a three page contract or they can't audition. Taking directly from the post:

Get to the table, and I notice there's a waiver you have to sign. No problem, standard stuff. Then I notice it's a three page contract. This contract basically said that if you play, you must sign the contract. Okay. No big deal here either. So I keep reading it. An interesting note. Anything you play can NOT be copyright, and can be used by Limp Bizkit in audio, video, or recorded form of any sort. Other big words which basically translated to the fact that if you play something, they are fully authorized to steal it and use it on a CD. The artist agrees to zero compensation and zero rights over the track, and will get their name in the liner notes "if possible."

Of course this doesn't sit well with a lot of people because this leaves a huge nasty open door for Limp Bizkit or anyone else that got their hands on one of those demo CDs to use that material in any way the person wants and there isn't a thing the person auditioning can do about it.

Fred Durst got pissed and threw this up on his website in response:

"Hello everybody, this is Fred. I want you to listen and listen close. That includes every piece-of-shit talking shit and every hater talking shit. This is specifically written for you in all honesty. Everything we, limp bizkit, do is motivated and driven by our love for our fans and love for what we do. All these fucking "he said-she said" bullshit rumors about what's going on with the guitar search are horseshit. Anyone who is mad about their experience trying out for limp bizkit at guitar center simply and plainly 100% sucked!!"

Which I'm sure nearly all of them did suck, but that's not the point. Eventually after hitting three or four cities and calling off the auditions before the announced ending time for most of those the band ended up picking up the former guitarist from Snot, Mike Smith. He hadn't participated in the audition process and this just fueled the rumors about the whole thing being a giant attempt by Limp Bizkit to steal the music from everyone involved and use it as their own.

I'm putting Limp in here because instead of dealing with all the pissed off people like someone that appreciates their fans, Fred basically told them (and all the people that auditioned) to fuck off and picked Mike Smith instead of one of the thousands of people that took the time out of their lives to audition. American Idol may suck in many many ways, but at least one of the thousands gets picked in the end.