Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien was the star of a five-minute video address at MidemNet today which – predictable joke alert – defied expectations by not being a bit glitchy at the start and exactly the same thing someone from Warp Records was saying five years ago. Ho ho.
He did talk about the industry, suggesting that in the last 10-15 years, “the money-men are running the record companies” – as opposed to the creatives (he cited Chris Blackwell as an example.
What’s good though? “What’s fantastic is the fact that we’re living in this time of change – this time of uncertainty… there’s huge scope for massive innovation and creativity. And that’s exactly what this industry needs, in my humble opinion.”
It’s become fashionable for artists to grouse about the sound quality of MP3 files, but Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is bucking the trend. “They sound fine to me,” he tells the New Yorker.
“They can even put a helpful crunchiness onto some recordings… We listened to a lot of nineties hip-hop during our last album, all as MP3s, all via AirTunes. They sounded great, even with all that technology in the way. MP3s might not compare that well to a CD recording of, say, string quartets, but then, that’s not really their point.”
However, he does have wider concerns about the abundance of MP3s and digital music, suggesting that it means “people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to… That abundance can push any music into background music, furniture music.”
That wallofice.com URL that sparked rumours of a new Radiohead EP? It was pointing at the band’s W.A.S.T.E. website, but has now been changed to a tetchy message seemingly aimed at bloggers who published the rumours.
“Don’t just publish bullshit only to get hits on your webpage. Don’t just create your own stories after reading one post on a message board. Get your facts straight.”
Without wishing to criticise the band, though… No, actually, to hell with it: Maybe, JUST MAYBE, the reason so many people wrote about the leaked track and EP speculation is less about bullshit and web hits, and more that they’re excited about the prospect of new Radiohead music, and furthermore the likelihood of it coming in an inventive digital way.
Or, in shorter form: Radiohead, get over yourselves. People can’t wait to see what you’re doing next: that’s hardly something to moan about.
(Hasty edit: Unless the site has nothing to do with them, and it’s not their message, obviously…)
A new Radiohead track leaked late last week, and has now been made available from the band’s own website as a free download. It’s called These Are My Twisted Words, and first appeared on file-sharing website What.cd last week, sparking rumours that the band themselves had leaked it.
That’s seemingly not the case, judging by the fact that it’s gone live on the band’s site today. “We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished,” says the accompanying blog post. “We’re pretty proud of it. There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practicing, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.”
That would seem to scupper rumours of a full EP to be released today, with fans having been puzzling over metadata in the leaked version of the track hinting at something called Wall Of Ice – with the URL wallofice.com leading to Radiohead’s W.A.S.T.E. digital store. These Are My Twisted Words is the second new Radiohead track to emerge in recent weeks, following the band’s tribute to recently-deceased war veteran Harry Patch.
The label has a budget of more than $20 million for its first year of operation, and plans to make the most of digital distribution and new pricing models. “We will do whatever is most effective to get noticed,” says MAMA Group co-CEO Adam Driscoll. “Giving an album away for free may get one million people listening to a new artist.”
New artists will get a 50% profit share, while established acts will get more. Crucially, artists will retain the copyrights to their songs released through Polyphonic.
If you’re a modern band with a strong connection to your fans, why not get them to do some free work for you? Like remix your new single, or create a video for it, or provide footage for your website or DVD by filming themselves covering your songs. The user-generated content (UGC) fan contest is increasingly a core part of music marketing campaigns. Here’s some of the ways to do it.
Remixable stems
Forget paying a superstar DJ a fat fee to mess with your masterpieces. Increasingly, artists are making their songs available for fans to remix. Radiohead’s release of individual instrument ‘stems’ for Nude through iTunes is one of the most famous examples, but Franz Ferdinand did it for Ulysses via Beatport, and Erykah Badu and Linkin Park have both done it. A couple of artists – K-OS and Third Eye Blind – have made their tracks available for remixing before the actual albums were out, with K-OS promising to include the best ones on the album itself.
No, not this one. This one. It’s a column written by India Knight in the Sunday Times this weekend about ‘Generation Freeload’, and you really should read it in full. Why? Well:
- “When Coldplay put their latest album online and said people could pay as much as they wanted for it – 5p or £5 or whatever they felt like – it turned out that most people still downloaded it illegally, for convenience.”
- “Downloads have already completely transformed (ie, killed) the music business, but I’d mind more if it hadn’t for so long appeared to be run by grossly overpaid people who never seemed to do much apart from take inhuman quantities of cocaine.”
- “There is a whole class of people that never pays for things, or at least not for the things that the rest of us regularly get our wallet out for. They’re the ones you find yourself sitting next to on a supposedly budget airline flight: you’ve coughed up £200 for your seat; they gleefully tell you they paid a fiver. They’ve watched the film du jour weeks before it opens in the UK. They listen to free music and don’t watch television by episode but by series.”
Oh my. The general tone of the column makes us hardly surprised the writer has confused Coldplay for Radiohead, but what were you thinking Sunday Times subs?
Two things we’ve learned about Cure frontman Robert Smith from this article: he prefers to blog in ANGRY CAPITALS, and he’s not a big fan of Radiohead’s In Rainbows campaign. Oh, three things: he’s not too keen on bloggers either.
“Any famous artist with a huge and devoted fan base (often arrived at with a little help from a wealthy and powerful `patron’ or two?) can afford to do what he, she or it wants… including giving their art away as some kind of `lossleader’ to help `build the brand’” he writes – we’ve spared you the caps.
“However, if this `art for free’ idea becomes the cultural norm then how do artists earn their living?… An artist has to value the art they create otherwise I don’t believe they can believe it to be art.”
Oh, and as for bloggers (with original caps this time): “I JUST WROTE ALL THIS BECAUSE I GOT PARTICULARLY FEDUP TONIGHT WITH THE SQUEALING HIGH DRAMA OF THE 101 STORIES A DAY AND NONE OFTHEM PARTICULARLY TRUE BRIGHT AND BRAVE NEW WIRED WORLD MEDIA THAT WHINES ONAND ON WITHOUT RESPITE OR REFUTATION… CRETINS!”
God bless him. And we say that with no sarcasm intended.
It’s easy to bang on about virality and online buzz, as if that’s something you can manufacture on demand. The fact is, you need to start with something worth buzzing about. That’s why some of the most viral internet videos or memes didn’t have a strategy behind them – they were just really cool. And thus people passed them on.
So, Radiohead doing 15 Step at the Grammys, with a great big marching band, and Thom Yorke donning his dancing boots. I’ve been forwarded the link to this seven or eight times today already…
Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien was the star of a five-minute video address at MidemNet today which – predictable joke alert – defied expectations by not being a bit glitchy at the start and exactly the same thing someone from Warp Records was saying five years ago. Ho ho.
If you’re a modern band with a strong connection to your fans, why not get them to do some free work for you? Like remix your new single, or create a video for it, or provide footage for your website or DVD by filming themselves covering your songs. The user-generated content (UGC) fan contest is increasingly a core part of music marketing campaigns. Here’s some of the ways to do it.
