Digital Noise: Music and Tech

When the history of the early 21st century is written, I'm afraid Radiohead will be included for pioneering a new business model rather than their groundbreaking music. Last year's digital-first release of In Rainbows allowed users to pay whatever they wanted for the download. Now there's an entire Web site devoted to pay-what-you-like: Aralie.com. It's a no-risk way for listeners to discover new music from independent bands.

Aralie gives fans a low-cost way to discover new music, and musicians a great way to gain exposure.

(Credit: Aralie)

It's also a no risk-way for independent musicians to get some exposure: it costs nothing to upload a song, there's no contract involved so you can sell your songs through other stores and remove them at any time, and the artist keeps 85% of all sales revenue. Aralie also offers an application that artists can embed on their Web site, where they probably get most of their traffic. The only risk is that users might freeload everything, but freebies can be a valuable promotional tool--that's how you build a fanbase who will come to shows and eventually buy CDs with more or better-sounding tracks.

It was just two months ago that Nine Inch Nails released its album Ghosts I-IV in multiple formats, from free nine-song download all the way up to a deluxe LP/CD/Blu-ray set. Today, the band started taking orders for free downloads of its next album, The Slip; like Radiohead did with In Rainbows, the band will subsequently release the album on CD and LP format.

The download era may see a return to the kind of prolific output we saw from The Beatles and other artists in the 1960s.

Everybody's interested in the business model--has free-then-fee already gotten old?--but when's the last time you saw a band release two albums in two months? Sure, Trent's interested in making a living, but he's also got lots to say and he wants you to hear it.

And over here in the other corner, we have Beck rumored to be following the Raconteurs and planning to "surprise" release his next album within the next four to six weeks--no advance copies to reviewers, no pre-release radio single, no preparatory wave of marketing hype. Across the pond, The Cure plans to release 13 singles over the next 13 months leading up to its next album release--and some of the B-sides won't appear on any albums.

This all sounds a lot like what the Beatles and other pop musicians and labels used to do in the 1960s--quick-release tons of music, mostly singles, and let the fans decide which sink or swim. Sure, there was a earload of marketing back then as well, but the ratio of hype to music was a lot lower. Perhaps the new model's going to be the same as the old model?

When one rock legend covers another, there's a fine line between one-upmanship and tribute, disrespect and validation. Prince is as cool as they come--surely you've all seen him upstaging Eric Clapton at the 2004 Rock Hall of Fame induction ceremony by shredding the heck out of Clapton's original solo on the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

Creep? Couldn't say. Weirdo? For sure.

(Credit: Coachella, Prince)

This weekend, he took a 15-year-old single by one of the biggest bands in the world--a song that the band distanced itself from and seldom plays anymore--and made it sound new again. Prince. Radiohead. "Creep." See the video on YouTube before it's pulled....

Earlier this year, Radiohead singer Thom Yorke explained to the AP that the band was going to take concrete steps to minimize its contribution to global warming, including traveling by airplane only when necessary and using solar-powered generators. But the biggest contributor, by far, to the band's global carbon footprint are its fans, who drive by the millions to its shows every time Radiohead tours. Hence, Yorke said that the band would play only "in places that have municipal transport systems in place or that we can persuade promoters to put on transport."

Radiohead is playing a venue (3) located halfway between Seattle (1) and Mt. Rainier National Park (2).

(Credit: Screenshot (Live Search Maps))

Apparently this dictate doesn't apply in Seattle. Most touring acts of Radiohead's popularity play in Key Arena, the basketball stadium (at least for another year, until the Sonics move to Oklahoma), which holds about 17,000 people. It's owned by the city, located in the middle of Seattle, and is easily accessible via the city's Metro bus system. But according to stories in today's Billboard and elsewhere, Radiohead will play the same venue they played last time, the White River Amphitheatre, a Live Nation venue located on the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation 35 miles southeast of town. (See a map with both venues here.)

White River's about five years old. It's a fairly small (maybe 12,000 capacity) outdoor venue in a pleasant setting, but it's plagued by a complete disregard for traffic planning. If every car disappeared from the road, it would take about 40 minutes to drive there from downtown Seattle. But because the last five miles leading to the arena are on a two-lane rural road, and because it is in a particularly sprawling exurban part of of King County where growth has gone more or less unmanaged for the last 15 years, it actually takes much longer--the one time I drove there, after work on a weekday, it took me a little more than two hours. Most of the time I was standing still, emitting great gouts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The venue is aware of the problem, and has put up a Web site with driving directions and instituted a free shuttle from the relatively nearby Auburn Supermall. But for the 550,000+ folks who live in Seattle, they'd have to drive 30 minutes to Auburn, park, then take the shuttle, which (according to people I know who've taken it) still takes about 30 minutes to creep the last few miles to the venue.

Draw your own conclusions. I'm prone to think that Yorke and the band are trying to do the right thing, but are too busy to worry about the details of every venue on the tour, and one of their promoters or assistants saw the note about the free shuttle and thought "sounds like public transit to me."

Someday, your children will ask you "what was a CD?" The Mars Volta's new album on USB has sold out its first run, with more becoming available in March.

(Credit: The Mars Volta)

A Billboard story this weekend discussed the rise of flash memory drives and bracelets as a medium for album releases. I knew that Willie Nelson had experimented with selling USB bracelets of live recordings, but artists like the Mars Volta and Ringo Starr are also offering new albums on USB. So far, because they're more expensive to produce than a CD, most artists are selling them as niche products for the biggest fans--for example, the Mars Volta is offering a monthly download to fans who pay $30 for the USB version of their last album, The Bedlam in Goliath, and Radiohead's former record label, EMI, is offering a live show download to fans who bought the USB drive containing all seven of the band's EMI albums. Eventually, though, as memory prices continue to drop--as they inevitably will--USB drives could become a mainstream product.

Companies like All Access Today and Aderra are already promoting services where they'll record you live and immediately press the recording on to a USB drive for sale at the show, so I'm sure independent artists could strike a deal with them to press a limited number of new albums on USB as well.

So while the CD's certainly not dead yet, its physical replacement is in the market today.

Rob Sheridan, a designer who's worked in the music industry, has posted a 6,000-word diatribe bemoaning the shutdown of file-trading network Oink and predicting (and encouraging) the death of the major-label system. It's an entertaining read, and should be required for Guy Hands and anybody else in the executive offices of the major labels. And he's not the only one who's predicting the death of the label system.

I'm currently reading a fascinating book, The World Without Us, which imagines what the world would be like if humans suddenly disappeared. So here's my thought experiment: what if we woke up tomorrow to headlines that all four majors had decided to get out of the music business and had freed the artists from their contracts? What would the business of music look like? ... Read more

To be truly legendary, a band needs a hidden message for fans to discover. The Beatles had the Paul is Dead rumor. Pink Floyd had the Dark Side of Oz.

Now, according to the indie-music blog Puddlegum, Radiohead has joined the list. Leading up to the 10/10 digital-only release date for the band's new In Rainbows album, Radiohead released cryptic messages to its fans involving the letter X (Roman numeral 10). Puddlegum believes the message goes beyond the release date, but instead suggests that In Rainbows is a sort of sequel to the band's breakthrough album, OK Computer, which was released a little more than 10 years ago, and was originally entitled Zeroes and Ones, and which (like the new album) has ten letters in its title, and...well, just read it for yourself.

I'm currently listening to the suggested playlist that combines both albums, and so far the connections seem tenuous at best--for instance, the four-beat "beep" count at the end of the first song on the playlist, "Airbag," is at a completely different tempo than the next song, "15 Step." But the songs do seem to fit well together, and overall it's a good playlist. Especially if, like me, you haven't listened to OK Computer in a long time after burning out on it.

The dam's breaking open: first Prince released a record as an insert in daily newspaper. The Eagles went direct through Wal-Mart. Radiohead announced plans to release its new album without the assistance of a major label, and rumors about Oasis and a couple of other British bands followed.

On Monday, Trent Reznor posted a gleeful announcement that Nine Inch Nails' record contract had ended, and that he would be experimenting with direct distribution to fans in 2008. This isn't surprising, given that Trent recently told fans at an Australian concert to steal his music. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Madonna is about to leave Warner Brothers and sign a $120 million deal with Live Nation, the concert promoter and owner of many large venues around the U.S. (Live Nation was spun out of Clear Channel when the radio giant got out of the concert business.)

The Madonna deal would be a little different than the do-it-yourself approaches being taken by Radiohead and NIN. Instead of no label at all, Madonna would actually be signing what's known as a "360 deal," in which her label gets a cut not only of record sales, but of merchandise and concert grosses. Only the "label" isn't a traditional label at all, but rather a company whose specialty is concert promotion. But the business model's probably going to be similar to the label-less acts: sell the album cheap, or give parts of it away, and charge a premium for the concert experience.

As I've said before, this approach might make sense for established artists, but if giving recorded music away becomes the norm, the road from local hero to rock star could be a lot harder. Beginning musicians tend not to have a lot of resources, and need a label (or some other backer) to help fund early tours. If labels have nothing to sell, who picks up the slack? Concert promoters and management agencies? Perhaps, but the economics are different--they can't rely on a highly profitable hit to fund the ten unprofitable artists still under development.

(Side question: can Madonna really play the guitar, as the picture in this article implies? Or does the soundguy turn her channel all the way down?)

U.K. newspaper the Telegraph has been giving lots of coverage to Radiohead's recent decision to offer its next album on a bid-for-download basis, with lots of breathless headlines. Some of the paper's analysis seems overly simplistic to me--the labels were in trouble before Radiohead's move, and younger kids buy plenty of CDs and downloads, just not from flavor-of-the-minute pop artists like they did five years ago. But the coverage emphasizes how much Radiohead's move is shaking up the music industry.

Today, the paper reports rumors that Oasis (who have the #3 all-time seller in the U.K.), Jamiroquai, and the Charlatans (known as Charlatans UK in the States) plan to follow in Radiohead's steps and release their next albums as free digital downloads. I doubt Jamiroquai or the Charlatans could sell enough discs to recoup the promotional and recording costs that a label would presumably impose, so they might as well give their music away as a promotional device. Oasis probably still has enough die-hard fans to recoup, but the publicity could help them recapture some folks who tuned out back when Liam's antics still made the headlines.

But look ahead a year or two, after 15, 20, or 50 high-profile artists have done the same thing. What happens when giving it away is no longer news? If artists don't reap free positive publicity from giving free downloads, will it still be worthwhile? Sure, it might deepen the connection between these artists and their existing fans, but how do these acts find new fans? Superfan #1 might forward the Web link to all his friends, but how many of them will clear a date in their calendar for the show? Especially since bands that sound good on record may suck live, and great live bands often put out mediocre records.

Free recorded music could also hurt artists who are just starting out. Touring's necessary to build a reputation. But there's a lot of up-front expense involved--who pays for all that merch they're selling at the table?--not to mention gas, repairs to the van, and the occasional night with a bed and shower. A label could help defray these costs, but if the label no longer has anything to sell, how does that work? Will every band need a designated yuppie or Trustafarian to front these costs?