Radiohead Burn Down Their Entire Audience
October 20th, 2007 | researchmaterial
25 Responses to “Radiohead Burn Down Their Entire Audience”
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Coilhouse is Hiring! Apply Here.
Coilhouse - 08 Feb 10
Back around the time of Issue 03, we launched the Small Business Advertising Program to create affordable ad space for indie companies in the print version of Coilhouse. By the time Issue 04 rolled around, the number of advertisers had grown significantly – by this time, we had record labels, jewelry and clothing designers, sculptors, other magazines, web hosts, toy makers and graphic designers advertising in our pages. Click here to see them all. With editorial duties taking up more and more of our time as the weeks go by, the moment has come for us to seek help with the advertising side of running the magazine. We’re looking to hire an Ad Manager for our Small Business Advertising Program, starting with Coilhouse Magazine #05… and possibly subsequent issues.
Full details after the jump!
Read the rest of Coilhouse is Hiring! Apply Here.
Post tags: Coilhouse
State of South Carolina Secretary of State Subversive Agent Form
jwz - 08 Feb 10
Check the appropriate box. Do you or your organization directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina or any political division thereof?
[ ] YES [ ] NOIf yes, please outline the fundamental beliefs. If applicable, attach a copy of the bylaws or minutes of meetings from the last year.
"Inflection Points" Presentation
Open The Future - 08 Feb 10
For those folks who are interested, here's the Slideshare version of the presentation I gave last week at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute annual meeting. I was asked to talk about foresight thinking, as the event theme was "The Big One of 2056: What Went Right?" a look at a fictional 7.8 quake in the SF region that was handled as well as they could imagine possible.
My goal was to offer a bit of reassurance to the audience that there is some real utility to thinking about the future, and to spell out (in a cursory way) the kinds of big picture issues they should keep in mind while looking ahead forty-six years.
Inflection Points
View more presentations from Jamais Cascio.
By and large, it was a successful talk. The post-talk questions were engaged, with little push-back, and I'm told that the overall response from the audience was quite positive.
The talk was video recorded, and I'm told will eventually be available to the public. I'll link when that happens.
CAN GIFTING ECONOMIES SCALE?
John Robb - 08 Feb 10
A gifting economy is different from a barter or market economy in that valuable items are given away to those that need them, without any quid pro quo, exchange, or payment. Gifting economics (lots of great papers on this topic) were/are the economic heartbeat of hunter-gatherer tribal cultures, the social organization where we spent 99% of our time as homo sapiens sapiens. Barter was, in contrast, a mechanism for economic interactions between tribes.
This gifting economic system wasn't based on pure altruism. It did have an enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance with the system over the longer term. On the positive side, there was an intangible increase in the social status (using personal or societal metrics) of a tribal member that gifted an item. On the negative, a failure to offer hospitality or gifts to those in need was considered a mortal slight that could incite violence or expulsion from the tribe.
There were also a considerable number of drivers for gifting at the tribal level. Here are some:
- The survival of the tribe, as a group, was more important than the survival of any individual. However, the loss of any individual could put the tribe at risk.
- The generation of surplus and innovation was highly uncertain. Sharing reduced that uncertainty to manageable levels.
- Sharing reduced internal friction that could put the tribe at risk.
Scalability
It's pretty clear that the societal drivers of tribal gifting economics and the mechanisms of enforcement didn't survive the transition to a global social system composed of billions of members. Simply, the connections between any two individuals (outside of immediate familial relationships) are too abstract for these drivers and enforcement mechanisms to be relevant. As a result, market based mechanisms for economic interaction have gained dominance.
However, the ongoing shift of the global market-based economy from a trade in rival goods (tangible items that invoke zero sum economics) to digital non-rival goods (items that can be copied at no expense or diminishment, endlessly) provides a window of opportunity. It may be possible to revive gifting economics for non-rival goods to amazing beneficial effect. Some ideas on how this could scale:
- Automated reputation metrics that enhance social status based on contributions.
- Mechanisms built using MMO gaming as a way to tie successful gifting to status improvement (leveling) or an ability to attract investment.
- The creation of an inside/outside barrier that separates a gifting economy from the global economic mainstream. Automated mutual interdependence (see my friend Bruce Sterling's absolutely brilliant story on this: "Maneki Neko").
Latest on SNOW
Jean Snow - 08 Feb 10
So what’s the latest on SNOW? I guess two new developments art that I added a dedicated Twitter feed, and also created a Facebook fan page. The Twitter feed is mostly just automated with new articles from the site — because some people actually prefer that over RSS feeds these days — but I do keep an eye on it, and will reply to questions and comments. The Facebook page is just another way of putting the site out there, and should be a good way of informing members of SNOW-related events as they happen.
Regular content updates have also continued over the past week, with a few new guest columns and my regular news items. Here’s a list of what you may have missed over the past few days.
- One Coin Comics
- Wired’s Personalized QR Codes
- Annapurna Moonrise
- Lone Expression: Tommy Guerrero
- Asato Z
- COLORS
- Shinjuku Disco
- Labyrinth of Woods
- Koukotsu
- Japan Pan Am
- BQLSI STAR LASER
- Mountain House by Atelier Bow-Wow
- Measuring Tape Toilet Paper
- Kuri
- No Man’s Land
- The 69th Tokyo International Gift Show
- Memories of Island Life: Ogasawara, 1992
- A House Made of Two
- 24-Hour Subway in Tokyo
- Tiltshift Generator for iPad
- Hair Club for Men: Style #326
- Droog Town House
- G-Tokyo 2010
- First Trailer for Kitano’s Outrage
- JAGDA 2010 Calendar for iPhone
I’d like to hear it from one of the band members mouth’s. Not from someone from the management company.
How exactly is that “Burning down their entire audience”?
They had to have faith that the album would sell.
They’re showing that you can make smart businesses AND be fair at the same time.
Besides, don’t listen to the industry rags.
Radiohead is public enema #1 to them right now.
The only way I can see this really being a burn would be if the CD was a dramatically different mix but I don’t see that on the cards.
Fans expected a CD release eventually with many of those assuming they’d pick one up.
This could just be management speak turned mantra to help this guy deal with peer pressure…..or if you want to look at it as information from someone in the know it could just be someone iterating that Radiohead didn’t change the rules of the industry – they just pissed on them a little.
I don’t see how that makes any sense as a business model. I bought their album online for a dollar. Why would I rebuy it on CD for $10?
The screenwriter Todd Alcott over at LiveJournal pointed me in the direction of this, tonight. Radiohead is, apparently, not at all broke from this move.
Manzo – you would rebuy it on CD because the version you downloaded off their site only has a bitrate of 160kbps, which is good enough, but it’s not great.
160KBPS might not be good enough for audiophiles, but for the legions of us who listen to music mostly through a computer or an MP3 player it is excessive. When I buy a CD I rip it down to 128KBPS, to get a good file size without introducing noise that is detectable on my hardware.
I thought Radiohead’s decision to go with 160KBPS was pretty smart… this was an experiment in reaching the masses, not in appeasing cheap audiophiles.
I thought I read the CD will have tracks not available through the download. People who bought online are going to feel like they only got a partial album.
aren’t we all forgetting something? amidst all the debate and counter-arguments lets not forget that its a damn good collection of tunes from a world famous band who lost the plot a bit on their last album. i love ‘in rainbows’ for its deceptively simplistic but ultimately powerful songs.
why is this a surprise, and what’s wrong with wanting to sell more records to people?
Also….
Have you considered that this revelation could be just another way in which they’re gauging people’s reactions to the music industry?
I don’t get how it’s a “burn” either. Are the folks who dl’d the music somehow getting screwed? Am I missing something?
Horrors! Everyone agrees that DRM-free, easily available and well-priced online music boosts CD and back-catalog sales, and is a Good Thing for Fans and the Music Biz.
Unless we /admit/ that’s part of the reason to offer DRM-free, easily available and well-priced music.
If a near-free download acted as an incentive to go ahead and buy the fancy packaged release for 40 quid, what exactly is the problem, again?
Double-standard pie, anyone? It’s the special today.
It makes sense to me. I mean, if an artist creates any work of quality, a good chunk of people will feel compelled to give them more money. This shouldn’t be a new concept to comic book fans, who are among some of the worst pirates on the Internet. Half the comics on my pull list and most of my trades are books that I downloaded first.
Considering that the first part of the album was harmless bollocks sounding like Moby teamed up with Coldplay (How much more lifeless can you get?), I don’t feel cheated by having downloaded it for entirely free.
It’s not like the second part won’t be ripped and downloadable anyway.
They are proving a significant point : People who were going to pirate the music ANYWAY were not going to pay for your album in the first place. Just look at the download figures on any torrent site. It’s not in the millions, or in the hundreds of thousands, more like a few thousand.
I’m a little stunned by this too.
If anything we had a band release to early adopters in a format they wanted and then to the mass market the same way.
How is this burning anyone? We don’t live in an entirely digital age, yet, and ignoring the “boxes-on-shelves” audience would not only be elitist it’d probably be crappy business sense.
And burn the rest of their fan base. I’d buy online from then again.
Burning their audience? Because of some comment from management about wanting to sell more albums? Get a grip. This was a great idea and as was previously stated, 160KBPS is fine for mass audience consumption.
Baen Books makes their ebooks free. They boost print sales.
John Scalzi published his first novel online for free. It made it into print and helped to launch his career.
MJ Rose started on the Net and is now in print too.
The Net still isn’t The World. (And part of me wants to jump up and yell Thank You Jesus! for that…)
“160KBPS might not be good enough for audiophiles, but for the legions of us who listen to music mostly through a computer or an MP3 player it is excessive. When I buy a CD I rip it down to 128KBPS, to get a good file size without introducing noise that is detectable on my hardware.”
Audiophiles generally wouldn’t be dealing with MP3.
It’s probably your ears as much as your hardware — some people hear high frequencies better than others, in which age is a factor. 128kbps CBR encoding cuts most sound above 16KHz, which enough people can hear as distortion that presets tend to default to higher. The biggest difference is variable bitrate gives better quality than constant, since more space gets allocated to reproduce parts of a song there’s more going on in, less if less.
In Rainbows: can’t say hearing the music made me want to buy the CD, or even listen to it again…
you guys may not get it, but those of us that decided to try this album ON PRINCIPLE, because we thought Radiohead were doing something cool and/or right, we do feel burned.
If I care enough I’ll grab a torrent. Musicians should release music for free and tour for their money (just like almost every new MySpace musician). I have no problem paying $8 to even $30 dollars a show….just not a fucking cd.
I’m sorry, Julien – I bought the album online, paid for it (5 quid/10 bucks). They might release a CD album later. Hell, it might even have tracks I don’t have; I’ll probably wind up downloading those. So I get the whole album eventually (or already, if those ‘new tracks’ are so much air) and I paid a price I chose. How exactly did I get burnt? I decided how much to pay, I paid, I got music, and it was good.
“We thought Radiohead [was] doing something cool and/or right”
They did something both cool and right. They put out another goddamn album. It’s pretty good. What more do you want? Them to not care about money? Even Shakespeare got to get paid.
And like people have pointed out, this is some management flack talking in that quote. I mean, we’re getting bent out of shape because a management PR hack says, ‘we’re only in it for the money?’ How is this surprising? ‘Managerial PR person a dick, only cares about money’ isn’t exactly news for the front page.
Johnny Greenwood had a snippet interview with some Rolling Stone recording device somewhere. It’s not exactly him or the band climbing on top of Mt. Asshole and raining shit upon all of us.
http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2007/10/10/radioheads-jonny-greenwood-on-in-rainbows-its-fun-to-make-people-think-about-what-music-is-worth/
And radiohead never claimed they were trying to be revolutionary…in fact, if you go to the inrainbows.com website, it states right there that the album isn’t in stores YET. Suggesting that it would be down the road. It was the media and bloggers that made a big deal out of it, claimed that Radiohead was trying to Change The World As We Know It. Radiohead themselves haven’t claimed that at all. They just wanted to get the album out before it leaked (as happened with their previous 3 albums).
Shoot. I’m going to go home and buy their album for 15 bucks. I’ve never really listened to any Radiohead, but I might like it, plus I like any artist who sticks it to the recording industry. When is this parasitic and overbearing industry going to die? Think about it. What are they referred to as? They’re called “the recording industry”. Their whole business model is based upon recording and distributing music being a very expensive and capital intensive endeavor. But guess what, it isn’t any more and no one needs them. They do a lousy job promoting new music, or at least new music that anyone with a brain likes and they do a lousy job keeping older music available. Why won’t they die! How many silver bullets, stakes through the heart and angry mobs of villagers will it take to put this shambling, braindead monolith down? OK, I’m going to get my prescription for amphetamines renewed and then drink a quad shot mocha to calm myself down.