Radiohead declares it's done with recording albums
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has declared, in an interview with The Believer, that the band has no plans to record another full-length album, preferring instead to focus on singles. A one-off from a band that can afford to call the shots, or a sign of things to come in entertainment, not to mention software?
Yorke cites the creative burden of recording an album, but I have to think the decision is as much about marketing an album as it is recording it. As Yorke relates:
None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off. I mean, it's just become a real drag. It worked with "In Rainbows" because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we've all said that we can't possibly dive into that again. It'll kill us.
"In Rainbows" worked on two or three different levels. The first level is just sort of getting a point across that we wanted to get across about music being valuable. It also worked as a way of using the Internet to promote your record, without having to use iTunes or Google or whatever...and it also worked financially.
To make it work, however, Radiohead went to great lengths to market the album, far less than it had to invest in distributing its latest gem, "Harry Patch." Regardless, while some music arguably makes more creative sense as part of an album, many songs stand alone and better fit the way music is being defined, distributed, and monetized.
This is perhaps best exemplified by comments, cited in a Wall Street Journal story, from singers Robert Earl Keen and Perry Farrell in the wake of the Lollapalooza festival:
"The music business is upside down," said alt-country singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen. "You don't tour to support your record. You put out a record to support a tour."
"Do you see people going record shopping? No," said Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction. "Downloading free music. Yes. Going out for live music. Yes. I love recorded music, but the best bang for my buck is the night I go out."
If you can accomplish this with singles, rather than the burden of an album, why not go that route? This is particularly intriguing given the continued pace of piracy, as a new study finds, because it requires a band to invest less in album creation and more time in monetizing the music through concerts and other "services."
Ditto for software. Google has already showed one way to get beyond the "album mentality" by providing its code on a perpetual beta basis. There is no big, once-and-for-all unveiling of Google's software, but rather a steady release of updates.
Open source is the same. Customers subscribe to a series of improvements and services around the software, rather than buying into a big licensing event. The emphasis is on what comes after the initial adoption of the software, not a bunch of marketing and hype to get people to use the software in the first place. The software largely sells itself.
In music and in software, we're moving to a services-based economy that relies less on DRM (digital rights management) and more on service-based connections between consumer and creator. The two blend ever more frequently in this digital age through the collaborative interplay between producer and audience.
For my part, I hope that Radiohead will release new singles early and often, with an emphasis on getting them out quickly to test their appeal, then fine-tuning them over time. The same holds true for software. My only question is if at some point in the future we'll see Linus Torvalds and Thom Yorke jamming together on stage.
Now that would rock.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I don't mind paying for music, but make it easy to download, DRM-free, and easy to upload to my ipod or mp3 player. If I have to go back for updates or check frequently for new songs, this would be too much of a bother for every band that I like. Then again, I may be the last person who still wants to buy albums (as digital downloads).
B. Radiohead said from the very beginning that they were offering the digital BEFORE they sold the CD as a set, with extras included. Everyone that BOUGHT the digital album from Radiohead's website (me included) knew the entire time that this was to be so. It was on their website, for goodness sake.
Radiohead never initially talked about mainstream distribution of physical media from bricks-and-mortars stores. They only came out later, saying something akin to "we thought this album was so excellent, we had to go out and find distribution for it."
I'm not sure what website those of you who think it wasn't ever meant to be released were looking at, but I have it written on my receipt from their store as proof of what the website said at the time - i even put the dates in my calendar for when it would be in 'bricks and mortar' stores because they gave an approx date they anticipated it would be released for mass. Their rationale for this was around trying to make the music accessible for everyone - not everyone has the internet.
Thom had said it would be great to not release it, he didn't say they wouldn't.
At least with mediocre art, you can pretty easily walk out or switch to something far better. With software, you have far fewer choices and whatever's the benchmark often falls far short of being of excellent quality.
The industry never learned, so when piracy hit big and iTunes gave you the option of buying only the good songs, what did they expect to happen?
http://music-mix.ew.com/2009/08/13/radiohead-these-my-twisted-words/
Better to have intermittent singles that are great, than a whole album that has bits of inspired work, but also contains drudgery-tainted songs.
You get the music free you pay for a concert ticket. You see a free show, you buy a t shirt. Somehow the band will always get paid. The thing that people like radio head are most upset about is that anyone can do it now. You don't have this short list of executives filtering out the competition.
Making a record is sssoooooo hard... Don't you feel sorry for Thom Yorke... Please!!!!!!! I've never had a record deal, but I've worked full time for my entire life and recorded music on nights and weekends like most musicians, I give away the music, play for free, and thank who ever it is that is up there or not up there that I was even given the ability to express myself through music.
- by James Anderson Merritt August 14, 2009 1:35 PM PDT
- Albums, as collections of greatest hits, recent work, or archival work make sense. I can't imagine that the band has to do a lot of work on such product. "Concept albums," on the other hand, sound like a LOT of work for the artists, because of the theme that must be honored throughout, not to mention the demands of sequencing the tracks and even, perhaps, telling a story. These kinds of albums -- for example, Sgt. Pepper from the Beatles, Pet Sounds from the Beach Boys, or even "The Beat Goes On" by Vanilla Fudge! -- weren't a factor in the music business until around the mid-60s, but then they became trendy. Anyone with pretensions to "art" had to do one or more concept albums. Eventually, people expected such albums .. that was the "meaning" of "album." I suppose that is what Radiohead is abandoning. But hey, never say never. If they come up with a good concept and a collection of singles that feed into it, you might very well see another Radiohead "album" in the future.
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(22 Comments)For now, however, the "marketing collection" style of album seems to have been made obsolete by the listener's ability to download any arbitrary collection of songs and sequence them at will, not to mention the vast capacity of dirt-cheap storage devices. The closest thing to an old-school, grab-bag album of that sort is probably the packs of songs you can buy for Rock Band and Guitar Hero. If so, then the album lives on, virtually.