Monday, December 10, 2007

Radiohead: band of the early millennium

We all know how far Radiohead has come since Pablo Honey. The band's pay what you want approach for In Rainbows has gotten tons of ink (or pixels, or something like that). Yesterday, the New York Times' Jon Pareles offered a deep look at one of my favorite bands:

SHORTLY after Radiohead released its album “In Rainbows” online in October, the band misplaced its password for Max/MSP, a geek-oriented music software package that the guitarist Jonny Greenwood uses constantly. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, Mr. Greenwood said over a cup of tea at the venerable Randolph Hotel here. As usual Radiohead contacted Max/MSP’s developers, Cycling ’74, for another password. “They wrote back,” Mr. Greenwood said, “‘Why don’t you pay us what you think it’s worth?’”

Well, Radiohead was asking for it. Those are the exact terms on which the band is selling the downloadable version of “In Rainbows”: Buyers can pay zero or whatever they please up to £99.99 (about $212) for the album in MP3 form. Sixteen years and seven albums into the career that has made Radiohead the most widely pondered band in rock, it is taking chances with its commerce as well as its art. For the beleaguered recording business Radiohead has put in motion the most audacious experiment in years.

Radiohead is not the first act to try what one of its managers, Chris Hufford, calls “virtual busking.” But it’s the first one that can easily fill arenas whenever it tours. “It feels good,” said Thom Yorke, the band’s leader, over a pint of hard cider at his local Oxford pub, the Rose and Crown. “It was a way of letting everybody judge for themselves.”

Radiohead’s pay-what-you-choose gambit didn’t just set off economic debates. It should also establish 2007 as two kinds of tipping point for recorded music. One is as the year of the superstar free agent. After fulfilling its contract in 2003 with its last album for EMI, “Hail to the Thief,” Radiohead turned down multimillion-dollar offers for a new major-label deal, preferring to stay independent.

“It was tough to do anything else,” Mr. Yorke said during Radiohead’s first extensive interviews since the release of the album. “The worst-case scenario would have been: Sign another deal, take a load of money, and then have the machinery waiting semi-patiently for you to deliver your product, which they can add to the list of products that make up the myth, la-la-la-la.”

Signing a new major-label contract “would have killed us straight off,” he added. “Money makes you numb, as M.I.A. wrote. I mean, it’s tempting to have someone say to you, ‘You will never have to worry about money ever again,’ but no matter how much money someone gives you — what, you’re not going to spend it? You’re not going to find stupid ways to get rid of it? Of course you are. It’s like building roads and expecting there to be less traffic.”

The band is an exemplar of how, as with politics, the Internet is causing big changes:

The second tipping point is the decisive migration of music to the Internet. Of course that has been anything but sudden. Music has been bouncing around online, sold or shared, since the days of dial-up, and bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Public Enemy gave away full albums online years ago. But the momentum of online music has been accelerating. Apple’s iTunes became the third-largest music retailer in the United States this year. Amazon added MP3 downloads alongside physical album sales. Hip-hop mixtapes, singled out for copyright prosecution by record labels, disappeared from stores and street corners only to thrive online, where the likes of Lil Wayne, Cam’ron and Kanye West release their latest innovations.

And Radiohead was able to draw worldwide attention to “In Rainbows” with no more promotion than a modest 24-word announcement on its Web site on Oct. 1. To the band’s glee, it could release its music almost immediately, without the months of lead time necessary to manufacture discs. Mr. Hufford said “In Rainbows” has been downloaded in places as far-flung — and largely unwired — as North Korea and Afghanistan.

On Nov. 9, as a kind of workaholic lark, Radiohead staged a free, thoroughly informal Webcast called “Thumbs Down,” with real-time performances of new songs and covers of Bjork and the Smiths, from its cluttered studio in Oxford. (Many clips are on YouTube.)

So, how does the pay-as-you-go model work when the rubber meets the road?

The band and its managers are not releasing the download’s sales figures or average price, and may never do so. “It’s our linen,” Mr. Hufford said. “We don’t want to wash it in public.” A statement from the band rejected estimates by the online survey company ComScore that during October about three-fifths of worldwide downloaders took the album free, while the rest paid an average of $6.

Factoring in free downloads, ComScore said the average price per download was $2.26. But it did not specify a total number of downloads, saying only that a “significant percentage” of the 1.2 million people who visited the Radiohead Web site, inrainbows.com, in October downloaded the album. Under a typical recording contract, a band receives royalties of about 15 percent of an album’s wholesale price after expenses are recovered. Without middlemen, and with zero material costs for a download, $2.26 per album would work out to Radiohead’s advantage — not to mention the worldwide publicity.

Both Mr. Hufford and the members of Radiohead said the strategy had been a success. “People made their choice to actually pay money,” Mr. Hufford said. “It’s people saying, ‘We want to be part of this thing.’ If it’s good enough, people will put a penny in the pot.”

“This was a solution to a series of issues,” Mr. Hufford added. “I doubt it would work the same way ever again.”

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