Will Radiohead's digital album shake record industry?
The seventh album by British art-pop band Radiohead is out today, but don't scan digital retailers or bricks-and-mortar stores for a copy. The band rocked the recording industry last week when it announced "In Rainbows" only will be available as a digital download via their Web site at a price dictated by fans.
The news comes at a perilous time for the recording industry, where the rate of digital sales long has surpassed CDs. That, combined with the recent shuttering of Tower Records and Virgin Megastores outlets, has created an uncomfortable alliance between major labels, struggling to find alternative ways to market new music to fans, and artists who see the industry as a behemoth that is no longer necessary in the paradigm of creating sustainable careers.
Radiohead's last album with EMI was 2003's "Hail to the Thief," which ended their contract obligations. Now a free agent, the band said it would release a CD version of the album sometime next year and already is taking orders for a deluxe vinyl and CD packaging of the album to be shipped in early December. The edition would include extra songs and photographs not available with today's digital download version.
The pricing model and distribution method are together considered a statement of purpose set against an industry that, since the days of Napster, has treated file sharing with contempt, creating years of bad publicity through lawsuits against file sharers, a refusal to lower the price points of CDs and encoding constrictive digital rights management technology and even spyware on CDs without consumer consent. While bands like the Smashing Pumpkins have already given away new music for free on their Web sites, no band before today has yet to test a way to sell a complete new set of music.
"(Radiohead) is the first band of that magnitude who can do it. It definitely helps them by being around a long time and establishing a huge following," said Mark Hefflinger, editor of Digital Media Wire, an online news digest for digital media. "I would hope it would serve as a wake up call and more labels would do more experiments by putting out albums like this."
Although it will take time to prove whether or not the experiment will shape the future of music retail or just benefit established bands with loyal followings, Radiohead's unexpected announcement is certainly making waves. On Monday, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails announced he was "free of any recording contract with any label" and has "watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different." "It gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit," he wrote on his Web site.
Patrick Stump, lead singer and guitarist of Chicago's Fall Out Boy, said by phone Tuesday that bands like his are closely watching decisions made by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails because they are setting a future precedent.
"I'm totally curious," he said. "Granted, these are venerable bands, but we've been looking to both those bands for other things, why wouldn't we be watching this? I want to see how it goes."