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Radiohead Open Sources Music Video
ruphus13 writes "Following up their 'pay what you like' music album, Radiohead is once again pushing forward with trying to innovate in an industry that has typically innovated with lawsuits alone. Radiohead has now decided to open source a music video. According to the article, 'Its new single "House of Cards" has a video that was created using advanced visualization techniques and various computer-rendered models. The band has teamed up with Google to release the data for the promo as open source using a Creative Commons license.'" The article links a making-of video on YouTube. The music of "House of Cards" was not open sourced, just the visual data. according to a story in the UK Guardian, people are beginning to play around with the data.
3 Radiohead, they're like the anti-Metallica :)
Considering they've already issued a press release that they won't be doing the pay your own thing again, (it was just a publicity stunt), I'm thinking this is exactly the same. Just a way for a bunch of old rockers to get some notice. I'll ignore it - if their efforts were genuine support for open source, that'd be one thing. But they're not.
In Rainbows is a great album.
It's not like they have some purely altruistic, over-arching mission statement that forbids them to have any kind of publicity, do they? First and foremost, they want to make and sell music. Unlike many other artists, they also happen to express strong views on politics and economics, but those expressions wouldn't matter much without any amount of publicity. The way they distributed and marketed "In Rainbows" was INTENDED as a strong statement (a publicity stunt, if you will) on the business model of the big labels, a proof that success in this business is possible without them. Even if they don't repeat this exact method of distribution with their next album(s), I'd be truly shocked to learn that they want to rebuild the bridge they have nuked in word and deed.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Unlike the Radiohead music our music is released via creative commons. Free even for commercial uses. http://www.politicsapocalypse.com/ I agree this is a cool thing to do but Radiohead charge people to download the sources to remix their album, they have said that the preferred way of listening is to buy the CD - not the mp3s, etc etc... Check out bands such as Nine Inch Nails to see a way of making $ while being nice to the fans.
It's a clear case of using open source as a buzz word to get publicity, and /. has fallen nicely for it.
MP3 Search Engine
So let me get this straight: Radiohead sells 1 million albums and each member gets what? 200k? (How many members are there again?) 200k for a platinum-selling album? And assuming people were only paying $16 a CD the label grosses $15 million from that same album? Great Jebus that is lopsided. And here I thought indentured servitude had gone out of style.