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E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
A New Album, and A New Way of Selling Music
How much would you pay for your favorite band's new album?
That's the question Radiohead is asking this week, with the announcement that fans can pre-order In Rainbows, their newest release, for any price they care to name, from the band's Website.
This is a revolutionary move for a number of reasons. For one, it completely cuts out the records companies, who, until now, were responsible for most of the industry's distribution. Record companies are in trouble these days, as everyone with an iPod and an Internet connection knows well enough. In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, music superproducer Rick Rubin reflected on the future of what he sees as an industry in turmoil. Record companies, as we now know them, he says, are already obsolete. They will either change drastically in the next few years, or be replaced by something entirely new. Radiohead's decision to circumvent conventional distribution, if successful, could drastically change the way albums are bought and sold.
Radiohead's scheme makes sense for both artists and fans. The more forward-thinking artists have realized that people are going to steal their music if they want to. If not, they'll buy it on iTunes, which benefits mostly Apple, or in a store, which mostly benefits the record company. By cutting out the middle man, even if people pay only a few dollars per album, they could stand to make more money in the long run. Fans are happy, dissatisfied as we've been with major labels habitually charging twenty bucks for sub-par CDs containing only a couple of good tracks. This is an opportunity for us to vote with our dollars for a system that seems far more sensible and practical than anything we've seen before.
This kind of sales model may not be the future of music, or the death of the recording industry as Rubin forecast, but it is certainly a concrete move towards a different, more egalitarian, way of selling music.