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The internet tubes have been a-buzz for the past few days with the news that Radiohead’s forthcoming new album, In Rainbows, is available for pre-orderdirectly from the band. They are not currently under contract with any major label, so you’re actually buying this album from the artists themselves. What’s more, the digital download version is available for the fan-friendly price of “whatever you feel like paying,” although there seems to be an upper limit of around $200. Those of you feeling super generous will have to just send them a check for the difference.
A few other artists have experimented with this flexible pricing approach, but none as high-profile as Radiohead. And while they’re still likely to sign with a label at some point, this is definitely an interesting step towards shortening the gap between major artists and their fans.
Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.
Not much in the way of details, but I’m sure those announcements he mentioned will be very interesting. Can’t wait to see where this goes.
And on a more Sinch-related note, all of our future releases are likely to be available directly from us (in case you didn’t know that already). We’ve felt this is the way to go for a while now and it’s good to see some major artists going down a similar path.
Amazon just launched the “public beta” of their new “Amazon MP3” digital download store.
This is pretty big news. Besides EMusic, all of the other digital stores are using some form of DRM, effectively locking out users of certain hardware and/or operating systems. iTunes sells some stuff in unprotected AAC format but it costs more and from what I have seen the selection is somewhat limited.
“Amazon MP3 is an all-MP3, DRM-free catalog of a la carte music from major labels and independent labels, playable on any device, in high-quality audio, at low prices,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President for Digital Music. “This new digital music service has already been through an extensive private beta, and today we’re excited to offer it to our customers as a fully functional public beta. We look forward to receiving feedback from our customers and using their input to refine the service.”
Amazon claims to have 2,000,000 songs available and with most songs priced at $0.89 (10 cents less than iTunes and most others), I’m sure I’ll be buying a few albums, if only to test out the service.
Whether or not they can compete with iTunes, I think this is important in that (if people use it) it will be a great example of how giving people what they want (in this case, unprotected music files) can actually be a more successful business model than trying to have control over the content after it’s purchased. EMusic has been doing this for a while, and been quite successful, but they don’t sell a lot of major label stuff. The fact that a lot of the major labels are on board with Amazon is what makes this interesting.
If you want to see more stores selling mp3s and other unprotected formats, I would recommend giving some serious thought to supporting this new venture. The rest of the industry is no doubt keeping their eye on how this all goes down. And you now have the power to send them a message by only spending your money with companies that respect their customers instead of treating them like potential criminals.
For the second week in a row Sinch destroys all enemies of time and space! And this time they bring it full force with the Ocular Noise Machine. FULL-ON MIND ASSAULT! Do not forget your Reality-preservation Goggles! Without them your consciousness will be obliterated! Enter at your own risk!
Saturday, September 22, 2007
9:00 PM
The Horse
1000 Old Bethlehem Pike
Sellersville, Pennsylvania 18960
Rumor has it that this show will feature a couple new songs that we’ve never played out before as well as the “FULL-ON” Ocular Noise Machine experience!! Your eyes and ears won’t know whether to stop, drop or roll. (Probably all three!)
Like the old saying goes, “I am a Sinch fan and I will come to this show or be cast into the eternal depths of Everywhere Else That’s Not Muggs.”
Have you ever been in a situation where you wished someone would call you so you could pretend that something important came up and you had to leave? Well, now you can do exactly that with the Popularity Dialer.
Just give it a phone number, date and time and the type of call you want, and you’re all set. The options range from the basic “popularity call” to “cousin in need” to the newly added “band practice” call, which is especially good for all you lazy musicians out there just looking for an excuse to get out of something.
Jack Black is kind of hit or miss with me. Sometimes I think he’s really good (School of Rock) and other times he can be kind of annoying (mostly everything else). But his new movie (or at least this new movie that he’s in), Be Kind, Rewind, looks really good. It’s directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), which probably has a lot to do with it, but I think Jack Black as actually a really good fit for this part. I probably would have seen this movie based on the concept alone, without even seeing the trailer:
A man becomes accidentally magnetized and erases all the tapes in the video store where his best friend works. To save the store, the duo re-enact and re-film every movie that its single loyal customer, an elderly woman, rents.
In case that isn’t enough for you, here’s the trailer:
This is almost certainly fake and probably part of some viral marketing campaign for Halo 3 or some other big budget project… but it’s totally the kind of UFO video I’ve been wanting to see my whole life. If this was real it would be the coolest thing ever filmed.
The people formerly known as the audience (TPFKATA) are doing more than just fact-checking newspaper stories, time-shifting TV shows and capturing breaking news on their cameraphones. They are also helping run their favorite bands, designing and voting on concert T-shirts, mixing studio albums and even voting on which cities should be included in a band's tour.
Added to Ma.gnolia: 1:43 pm, Monday, December 15th
Beep-it is an optical theremin synthesizer. It outputs a square wave signal whose pitch is modified by the amount of light detected. The sound resembles that of early 8-bit video games.
The digital music revolution has fractured media consumption into niches, shifted creation and distribution from the few to the many and nearly leveled the playing field between the powerful labels and the committed individual....
Added to Ma.gnolia: 11:41 am, Tuesday, November 25th
