Radiohead: Still Firmly in the Music Biz, Labels ‘n All…

Radiohead’s new pay-what-you-can model for their most recent album has the internet in a tizzy – and, I suppose, rightly so. By releasing their new album online the band not only circumvents the restrictive ownership rules of the record companies they also skip their pricing models. If nothing else, Yorke et al need to be congratulated for the sheer bravery of the move and, for consumers and music fans, this is win-win.

But before we get too happy, a couple of things: 1) In Rainbows is still being released as a CD through the majors; 2) this would all be a bit irrelevant for any band that wasn’t already huge. At the end of the day, Radiohead still needed the major lablels, either to get to where they are now or to provide a sufficiently deep distribution network to get the album out to millions of people. Even though I believe Radiohead has their heart in the right place, that they can release an album with a next-to-nothing price tag is a function of their pre-existing fame and wealth, not simply their ideals.

But my point is not to claim that Radiohead are hypocrites. Rather, I’m suggesting that they aren’t bucking the system as much as encouraging it to move in a more open direction from within. To wit, this is not a ‘fuck the man’ move but rather is a big player trying to shake up the rules of the game. And the lesson to be learned here is not that we need to get rid of all record labels or break down our existing distribution models – it’s that we need to reshape how the music industry works: how it thinks of content, how it thinks of consumers and how it intends to make a profit.