So did you hear about the new Radiohead album? Yeah? Shit. So maybe I’m a little late. Ok, well, have you heard about how Radiohead have decided to issue the album solely from their website, with a price of whatever you, the consumer, wants to pay. Yeah? Well, I heard that too. About five thousand times. Read a review of ‘In Rainbows,’ which is the name of the new Radiohead album if you’re a Martian, and you wade through paragraph after paragraph of bullshit intellectuals adding their unasked for opinion on Radiohead’s selling strategy. When I asked for a review.
Now I’m in the enjoyable spot of writing for a marketing website, and I want to review the album instead to put all those inept reviewers in their place. I’ll compromise, and do it backwards, and make a review you’ll likely want to skip, and then have all my genius marketing observations at the end. Sound fun?
Radiohead are genius’s, they’re godlike, they figured out the theory of relativity, they were part of the original cast of ‘Gone With the Wind.’ They’re supposedly the modern Beatles, Time magazine believes that two of their CD’s are the most important of their decades, and Q magazine ranks ‘OK Computer’ the best CD of all time. Personally, I like them. They can hop from genre to genre, instrument to instrument, and everything flows, everything is cohesive. To me, the trick about Radiohead is that they do a bit of everything well. Give the Brit Pop junkies their falsetto on “The Bends,” the guitar freaks their solos on “OK Computer,” the electronica experimentalists their new frontiers with “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” and people who love the gray area in between all these extremes “Hail to the Thief.” When friends ask me to show them music, there’s always a suitably appropriate Radiohead song.
This makes actually critiquing a Radiohead album rather hard, because some of the songs that I don’t particularly like, might be the exact songs that some fans are looking for. However, being that I have a finite word count to this review, I’ll give a try for a critique. ‘In Rainbows’ is good, that’s something I think every fan will agree on. I think it is the type of album every type of fan can appreciate, and while it might not be their favorite, it should be second ahead of those other facets of Radiohead they are not such fans of. ‘Video Tape’ is a song to walk through a rain storm with, ‘15 Step’ should be your alarm clock, ‘Nude’ is something you play in the background while having a romantic dinner with your girl friend, and ‘Reckoner’ is gorgeous, the soundtrack to a bitter sweet day, the music that you hear walking past a church and makes you want to go Lime Wire hymns.
And my unnatural reference to Lime Wire is the perfect way to have a natural segue into marketing, since, as I’m sure you know, ‘In Rainbows’ needs no Lime Wiring, its free already.
Well, Radiohead pulled off a marketing coup. ‘In Rainbows’ was referenced everywhere: CNN, BBC, Time, local newspapers, local news shows, in interviews with Hillary Clinton. It fulfilled the task of some of the best ads without spending a single dollar: it was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, and they were curious about the product.
There is a dilemma of course. When I think of the point of marketing, I think of dollar signs, and while Radiohead has been able to make a tidy chunk of money, it’s doubtful this method is sustainable. Why was this record such a big deal: because it was a novelty, a product that asks your conscience, in addition to providing a service.
An analogy of why this would not function for products en masse, is the electric signs that measure the speed of your car. The first time you see one, and you realize how fast you are going, you think about it. Having that sign in front of you, telling you the immorality you are committing, it is inescapable. However, the second time you go past the electronic speed measurer, and you realize that there is no punishment for your speed, the moralistic questions would have already been pondered and you would have no incentive to slow down. Between a service for free, and a service for money, how can money compete, and to have a product attempt to morally seduce you with every purchase will eventually deaden your moral sense.
Any band that was to follow Radiohead in this scheme would fail, I feel. The success of ‘In Rainbows’ is largely due to the huge publicity, and the publicity was due to the novelty and the novelty cannot be recreated. Worse, anyone to follow this format would be labeled copycats, and the souls of the consumer would be turned against the band, and when a band is depending on a persons moralistic approximation of a bands worth, they want the consumer as happy as possible.
What this promotion did do, which in fact might have been its point, was to ask the excellent question of where does the music industry go from here. It’s a hard question, and Radiohead has to be given high praise for showing that alternative ways exist, even if they did not discover a true alternative.
Barrett Nash
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