Radiohead

Radiohead experimented by offering their music online, allowing the public to set the price for how much the music should be worth. It was an intriguing offer, upsetting a long established method where the music labels sold the goods--this case being the music created by artists as varied as Annie Lennox and Bjork. When the news first broke about Radiohead's offer, there was a sense of gloom and doom in the world of music labels, a business model that has to clearly be reinvented in this era of downloads.

For me, I was certain the public would rise to the test set forth by Radiohead, where the music label, the middle man in any transaction, would become obsolete as more and more musicians offered their goods directly to the public. It was a tremendous moment for change in a long held practice where the middle person made a ton of money off of something they had no hand in producing, and the producer got pennies on the dollar for every record or CD sold. And as an artist, the whole intellectual property question in an era where anything is accessible from a computer was compelling since our laws don't seem to keep up with the rapid changes technology creates.

And on a personal human level, I thought the generosity of the human spirit would show the music labels that people are capable of doing the right thing by paying fair prices, perhaps not the $15.00 currently the price for a new CD, but something that would not cheat the musicians. Well, how wrong I was, or rather, how naive I was to assume that people would do the right thing. It seems most of those downloading the albums did it without offering any money, whatsoever. And the average price offered by those, who did pay, was in the $6.00 range. The price may still be fair if the artists are getting the money directly. Considering how little it must cost to mass produce the actual CD's, I would say this price is fair.

The real shame in this experiment's failure is that other artists may never join in by doing the same. And most are pissed, rightfully so, because so much of their music has been downloaded for free. Being the Miss Goody Two Shoes that I am, or the guilt-ridden Catholic, I could never get into the whole free download phenomenon. As the old saying goes, "There's no free lunch," and so I always assumed someone would pay, either the consumer or the creator. Since I'm a creator it shouldn't be surprising I'm more sympathetic to the artists.

So, this moment has passed, and in a way, we, collectively have failed miserably. It would have been interesting to see if they could have done some sort of demographic poll of who paid versus who didn't. If there is a distinction in generation. It's safe to assume no other artists will do the same, even if Prince recently offered up free copies of his CD in London. But until the laws get wiser, or the industry creates a new model, this tension between artist and consumer will exist. And as artists see few real dollars in CD sales, but only in the touring end, well, there may be a time when they will only release albums at concert venues. That would be, for this musicphile, a real shame since concert tickets cost as much as a mortgage, in some cases. If that becomes the new method to procure new music, I may have to join all the other on line thieves and start downloading for free.