Google has quite a bit in common with British rock band Radiohead: both have reputations for shattering corporate and artistic boundaries, both make constant headlines in the tech press regardless of what they do, and both will likely be seen as icons of early-21st-century futurism for years to come. (And both likely have some beef with record label EMI: Radiohead ditched the label to embark upon the high-seas adventure that is In Rainbows; Google lost chief information officer Douglas Merrill to EMI earlier this year.)
But it's still a surprise that Google, long known for keeping its hands out of content creation, has chosen to outright promote Radiohead's new video, for the In Rainbows track "House of Cards." The reason? The super-cool technology behind it.
"A few weeks ago we heard about a project Radiohead was working on," Google product manager Ola Rosling wrote in a post on the company blog on Monday. "The band was making a new video, but they weren't using any cameras, just lasers and data. As you might imagine, we were intrigued."
The video, a trippy display of 3D renderings that show faces, conversations, and eroding architecture, uses scanning technology from Geometric Informatics and Velodyne.
A Google-hosted site for "House of Cards" leads interested viewers to the video, a "making of" clip along with links to learning more about data visualization and laser technology, and options to embed a Google "gadget" containing the video or a Radiohead iGoogle theme--as well as play with the technology itself.
"Whether you're a music fan or a developer (or both), we agreed with the band that it would be great to give you a deeper look into how all of this was done," Rosling wrote, "and even a chance to play with the data yourself, under a license that allows remixing."
Google, for that matter, uses 3D laser scanning for its Street View project. And it's been taking more interest in the art world, hosting a glitzy event in May to kick off artist-designed themes for the iGoogle personal home age service.
(Credit:
Radiohead)
The likes of iTunes, iLike, and Imeem might be making troubled record labels' lives a bit more complicated. But on a brighter note for the music industry, they've also created digital music's ultimate publicity stunt.
A press release came out Wednesday from our sister company Last.fm, touting the fact that Radiohead's landmark album In Rainbows is now available for free streaming on the site.
In Rainbows has been out since October, and it was famously distributed across the Web with a name-your-own-price policy. So it's not exactly the freshest story, though In Rainbows is no longer available for free and had not been turned into a free stream anywhere on the Web. The band had originally opted to distribute it through its own Web site.
But these "digital release" announcements, where an artist that already has a decent fan base teams up with a digital music service, are growing more and more popular. R.E.M. debuted its most recent album, Accelerate, as an ad-supported stream on iLike in February; and in May, Imeem debuted Anywhere I Lay My Head, the album by actress Scarlett Johansson.
It's probably a win-win situation for both the site doing the promotion and for the album: the artist gets extra publicity, especially if accessing the streaming file requires joining a mailing list or signing up as a "fan," and the site gets some buzz from new visitors who may be fans of the band but haven't heard of the site. Assuming neither party paid an arm and a leg to get the promotion in place, it's a cheap way to promote an upcoming album even as the concept of "albums" grows increasingly antiquated.
AOL and Yahoo have done this for years with pre-release "listening parties" and exclusive tracks, but because sites like Last.fm and iLike use developer platform access to tap into the social-networking audiences of Facebook-MySpace-Bebo-ad-nauseam, they can reach a more distributed network of music enthusiasts. And bigger digital-music players are doing it too, with iTunes and MySpace debuts (not to mention exclusive songs) already industry mainstays.
That said, it's only a matter of time before this sort of promotion is so commonplace that it's no longer newsworthy--remember when we all wrote breathlessly about every big Web company's foray into Facebook applications?
Disclaimer: Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes News.com.
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