Radiohead to fans: "Remix us, please"
Radiohead is changing the way the music industry works. Pay what you wish? Check. Make your own music video for its songs? Check.
Now Radiohead is taking things one step further by partnering with Apple to give fans a chance to remix one of its best songs from its fantastic In Rainbows album:
The contest offers up the single "Nude" from the album for remix. The band has for sale on iTunes "stems" for the bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums for the song and anyone who purchases all five gets access to a GarageBand file that can be opened in GarageBand or Logic.
The deal is good for Radiohead as it gives the band even more free publicity. It's good for Apple as it gets people tinkering on its software.
Best of all, it's good for fans who want to interact with Radiohead's music more intimately than the old "We make it, you buy it" music model. Keep tearing down those walls, Radiohead. Or climb up them. It's all good.
Will people do this? Probably not. Not most people. But this is how Radiohead keeps pushing the industry to be more like open source. Only a select group needs to take up the mantle for it to work. The rest of us benefit from that small selection of people with the interest and aptitude in remixing.
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.
...and all of the Garage Band files were free to download.