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Radiohead Says Name Your Own Price for New Album
TechDirt is reporting that the band Radiohead has apparently chosen the path less traveled when it comes to the release of their new album. They are offering two very unique methods of purchase for their new music, the ability to name your own price for a digital download or the ability to purchase a special "discbox" which will contain the album on CD and vinyl in addition to a horde of goodies. Will be interesting to see how this new model works out for them and what it might do to more traditional methods.
Ha! They have to put it on us to fix the price for them selling out...used to be that they could sign a fat contract to a record company for that.
So if social engineering works, who will pay the most for it? Who will pay the least?
man rtfm
...it's still Radiohead.
"This food is terrible." "Yeah, but the portions are HUGE!"
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
That's about what it would take for me to pick up anything by Radiohead, so long as they didn't force me to listen to it.
Not that I should honor your remark by replying but WTF? I see you got fed on bullshit growing up. Hope you liked the taste.
1. I'm a Jew
2. I've moved away from downloading via torrent and/or emule to buying from the iTunes Store. I love the service and appreciate the fact that I can move my music in between 5 authorized machines. I have no feeling that I don't "own" my music and vids purchased there.
3. I'm finally going to be a proud Mac Owner as soon as my Apple Store card comes this week. Macbook, here I come! (non-sequiter but thought I'd throw it in).
4. I'm active in the local Jewish Community. Funny, I've never been invited to one of those meetings where we supposedly plot to overthrow the world or ruin some other country's economy. You should visit Israel sometime. The streets there are rather decidely NOT paved with gold.
5. On the other hand you run into assholes everywhere. Some of them are at Synagogue - some of 'em here on Slashdot. In fact, I seem to be addressing one right now.
6. So...if you have 10 dishonest used car salesmen and 9 of 'em are WASPs and one is a Jew, I take it your attitude is, "9 of 'em screwed ya, one of 'em Jew-ed ya", yes?
7. Fuck you.
Of course, if it is worth $0.0 to you, you probably won't download it, and you won't care about the price...
As it is in my situation regarding Radiohead...
Who the fuck uses vinyl except Niggers? They can't afford a cd player and got to use their grandmas record playa while eatin grits, shiiiiit
It's worth nothing to me, because I don't want to listen to their whiny music. If only there were some way I could actively keep them from staying afloat so that they all had to wind up broke and poor and scrounging for change in the streets. That is something I would participate in.
However, for a good band, this would be an innovative idea.
Number one, it isn't two CDs and two LPs, it's one album on CD, that exact same album on vinyl, and a CD of "extra songs". For the superfan that's great, and I like their music, but those songs usually turn out to be crap except for one or maybe two good ones. Certainly not enough to call it 2 CDs as if it had just as much value as the album you're actually trying to buy.
Number two, the digital download, unless it's vastly different than any other digital download, is next to worthless. MP3 even at its highest quality leaves audible artifacts and reduces bandwidth. I find it difficult to get excited about a format that sounds worse as my equipment gets better.
Three, saying that it's asinine to complain about the production quality of an album is, if not asinine, at least foolish. Perhaps you can't tell the difference between a great song mastered like shit and a great song mastered well, but I can, and I'm sick of the fact that people play through nothing but computer multimedia speakers with huge frequency gaps and overstated bass, or hundred-dollar iPod speaker packs that should cost $15 makes every album pressed these days into an over-compressed turdsicle sound when we have the technology to make it sound better than it ever has. Fact: They aren't compressing the shit out of their albums and clipping them because they like the sound. No-fucking-one likes that sound, no one on Earth, it's just not possible. They're doing it to make it sound "louder". That's it, and it's stupid and it makes great songs sound like shit.
Four, both you and the AC that replied to my other comment missed the fact that I do like their music. This alternative distribution, however, and possibly your fandom, has blinded you to the fact that they are not giving you any more value for what you're paying. They aren't giving you the ability to choose what to pay for your digital download, you've had that since Napster, and whether it's legal or not there's just too many people doing it to ever change the fact that the prices are out of their hands now. This box set is great for the superfan, but like any other box set it isn't worth nearly what you're paying for it. In making the digital download available and the box set, they've taken away the already existing option of a $15 just-plain-CD that there has long been an agreement is overpriced. At least overpriced at $15 is only $15, though.
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Right, I'm pretentious because I claim that MP3s are an inferior format. I don't know what kind of weird jealousy or other emotions lead to you becoming hostile because I say that MP3 isn't as good as lossless, high dynamic range is better than next to no dynamic range, and unclipped is better than clipped, but I have a hunch that it's the fact that you don't hear any difference. Well, to make you feel better, I'm sure that you could hear the difference if you knew what to listen for and listened for it. In fact, you can even say that it's your choice to not listen for it, and try to turn that into some justification for why you're better than me instead of arguing the merits of a given distribution method or format.
Sure, I'm the troll, I'm the pretentious one, and the guy that turns his inability to take any criticism of his preferred format into a personal attack on me, yeah, he's the insightful one. This is ridiculous. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills that on Slashdot, of all fucking places, I'm being basically mobbed for not falling for bullshit, preferring the objectively better format, and yes, maybe being a little pretentious.
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Or, instead of (or perhaps in addition to) being a dick, it's the fact that I can get a higher quality rip for less than $80, and they don't give me an option to not get a bunch of junk that I don't want but pay more for decent quality.
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What? The fact that I don't like the production of current music, can't stand Mars Volta, never heard of Animal Collective, and am asking them to return to the production values they had when some of my favorite bands--The Beatles, The Who, Black Sabbath--were around, and fight that trend in whatever little way I can whenever I can, that's why music is the way it is today?
Also, I don't care that the music is good? You don't know what you're talking about. I listen through that, but I listen to the crap production value stuff the same way everybody else does: either for a short duration, at low volume, or drunk. It affects everybody else the same way, the only difference is that I know why we listen to music that way now. And I have absolutely no problem with music being like Radiohead, they're one of the best bands in existence right now. Maybe that's not saying a whole lot these days, but they ain't bad by any stretch of the imagination.
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