Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

Radiohead’s new album - who needs a label anyway

Radiohead have announced their new album will be released on October 10th from their website. They will be releasing an all-singing, all-dancing, all-moodily-staring-at-the-floor boxed set thing with some vinyl, cds, photos etc for £40 (about $80) but the most interesting bit is that they are letting people download the album for as much as they think it’s worth. Since Radiohead do not have a record deal, they can do what they like and they have realised that the old model for music has pretty much been killed off by the internet. The record labels, who are supposed to be the experts in this stuff, still haven’t realised this and still keep plugging away with the old ways of doing things and getting upset about this, or Prince giving away his new album with a newspaper. What they fail to see is that this lead to a level of exposure Prince hasn’t seen in years and allowed him to sell squillions of tickets for his recent residency in London. My prediction is that Radiohead will find many more people downloading this than previous efforts and will mean there are people getting exposed to their music that wouldn’t bother otherwise, hence there will be more people going to their gigs, buying their t-shirts etc, which is where most artists make their cash these days anyway. I mean can anyone actually remember a Rolling Stones album released since about 1982?

The recrod industry needs to do two things - firstly let aggregators have full access to all their back catalogue, secondly charge as much or as little as they want for a download. Very soon you will see a huge selection of music out there, people can get exactly what they want. Secondly you will see the recommendation engines and search tools develop hugely and people will start buying tons of music. Admittedly for a lot less than the utter rip off on iTunes, but the quantity will be vast. Quite simply the industry needs to move from a boutique store business model to a supermarket style model. You only need to look at Tesco or Wal-Mart see that this is a much better model. The other advantage is that you soon do not care who makes money from the back-catalogues as you will make your percentage regardless. Currently the labels are at the whim of the big suppliers for pricing and they have to provide the inventory, so there is risk there on over-ordering etc. Often they have to pay for shelf-space to get their new artists out on shelves, spend huge amounts on marketing….surely it’s got to be easier to let Amazon or Rhapsody do that for you?