Why Radiohead is Not Spearheading the Future of Online Music
Posted by Jeff on Oct 16th 2007, 22:22
As you've probably already seen and heard everywhere, Radiohead did something really special with their new album In Rainbows. Free of a record contract, Radiohead released their album themselves. And, in a paradigm-shifting move, they let consumers choose what to pay for the album. If you wanted it for free, you got it. If you thought it was worth $50, you could pay that much for it. Success! The world has been turned on its head.
Or has it?
2nd behind only huge acts at the Rolling Stones/Madonna/Beatles level, Radiohead is probably the most popular band in the world. As such, they're loaded. They have more cash than Davy Crockett. They've also been professional musicians since, well, forever. They've toured around the globe dozens of times and recorded 10+ albums. They have a rabid fan base full of devoted listeners who trade bootleg recordings across the internet.
And it's awesome that a band of this caliber is free and open to essentially flip the bird to the RIAA. Everyone is happy. Let us all rejoice!
Not so fast everyone.
Let me introduce you to a little band called The Gossip. (I had to link to their MySpace cause they don't even have a official site yet.) They used to rock the Seattle music scene, but now live in Portland. In a recent article in New York Times Magazine, Rick Ruben mentions that this is the first new artist signed to Columbia (his new employer) that he's excited about. I love them. Everyone I've introduced them to loves them. Long story short, they're on the cusp of hitting the big time. And like Radiohead, I'd have no problem paying $20 for their album.
And yet despite teetering on the edge of success, the "Radiohead model" of music sales - release it for free and use the music as fuel to power money making machine of live performances and merch - will not work for the Gossip.
In order to distribute your music online you need a huge capital investment. That money goes towards recording and producing an album, encoding it in digital format, designing and implementing a website to serve the files, and a large enough server with enough bandwidth to handle all the downloads. Plus, since not everyone is of Radiohead caliber, you've got to spend some time and/or money to market to get people to hear about you. It's a lot of work. Now, imagine that processes done by every band on the planet. That's a lot of noise and not much signal, which is the essence of the problems with the music industry.
Self promotion is not the answer to the music industry's woes. Not every band has the resources to follow Radiohead's lead and go off and release their own. If they did, bands would never sign with record companies in the first place.
And while conniving and money-hungry, the record industry knows one secret about their industry: it's way to crowded for anyone to make sense of all of it. At least not a 16-year-old kid putting in 40 hours a week at school and stealing his Dad's beer on the weekends. People need someone to apply the filter to the collective fire hose known as the music industry, and periodically present them with well marketed and packaged musical acts that they can get behind and be a part of. For the recording industry, the formula is simple and effective: promote a new artist, collect money from CD sales, rinse, repeat.
But now that file sharing has blown the lid off of that model, record companies don't have control over the message any more. And while it's pissing them off, it's making consumers lives both easier and more complicated. People are free to listen to whatever band they feel like that moment, but there is no organization of that "noise" I made mention of before. How the hell does that 16-year-old kid know who to listen to? Radio sure isn't doing that job anymore.
That's part of the reason I founded TuneShout. To use the power of a website's user base to help people find the music that they want to hear. Radiohead doesn't have that problem, as I mentioned before. They're already rich and well known. Whatever they do, people will listen. But the Gossip is still, despite all their pending success, stuck in with the rest of the masses, trying to poke their head above the waves to get people to notice.
So if Radiohead's model isn't the solution, what is? Well, to be quite honest, I don't know for sure. If you can create a system that lets people easily find, discover, sample, fall-on-love with, follow and eventually buy the music of a band who is in control of their own destiny. And do it all under one roof. That's is the future of online music.
Or has it?
2nd behind only huge acts at the Rolling Stones/Madonna/Beatles level, Radiohead is probably the most popular band in the world. As such, they're loaded. They have more cash than Davy Crockett. They've also been professional musicians since, well, forever. They've toured around the globe dozens of times and recorded 10+ albums. They have a rabid fan base full of devoted listeners who trade bootleg recordings across the internet.
And it's awesome that a band of this caliber is free and open to essentially flip the bird to the RIAA. Everyone is happy. Let us all rejoice!
Not so fast everyone.
Let me introduce you to a little band called The Gossip. (I had to link to their MySpace cause they don't even have a official site yet.) They used to rock the Seattle music scene, but now live in Portland. In a recent article in New York Times Magazine, Rick Ruben mentions that this is the first new artist signed to Columbia (his new employer) that he's excited about. I love them. Everyone I've introduced them to loves them. Long story short, they're on the cusp of hitting the big time. And like Radiohead, I'd have no problem paying $20 for their album.
And yet despite teetering on the edge of success, the "Radiohead model" of music sales - release it for free and use the music as fuel to power money making machine of live performances and merch - will not work for the Gossip.
In order to distribute your music online you need a huge capital investment. That money goes towards recording and producing an album, encoding it in digital format, designing and implementing a website to serve the files, and a large enough server with enough bandwidth to handle all the downloads. Plus, since not everyone is of Radiohead caliber, you've got to spend some time and/or money to market to get people to hear about you. It's a lot of work. Now, imagine that processes done by every band on the planet. That's a lot of noise and not much signal, which is the essence of the problems with the music industry.
Self promotion is not the answer to the music industry's woes. Not every band has the resources to follow Radiohead's lead and go off and release their own. If they did, bands would never sign with record companies in the first place.
And while conniving and money-hungry, the record industry knows one secret about their industry: it's way to crowded for anyone to make sense of all of it. At least not a 16-year-old kid putting in 40 hours a week at school and stealing his Dad's beer on the weekends. People need someone to apply the filter to the collective fire hose known as the music industry, and periodically present them with well marketed and packaged musical acts that they can get behind and be a part of. For the recording industry, the formula is simple and effective: promote a new artist, collect money from CD sales, rinse, repeat.
But now that file sharing has blown the lid off of that model, record companies don't have control over the message any more. And while it's pissing them off, it's making consumers lives both easier and more complicated. People are free to listen to whatever band they feel like that moment, but there is no organization of that "noise" I made mention of before. How the hell does that 16-year-old kid know who to listen to? Radio sure isn't doing that job anymore.
That's part of the reason I founded TuneShout. To use the power of a website's user base to help people find the music that they want to hear. Radiohead doesn't have that problem, as I mentioned before. They're already rich and well known. Whatever they do, people will listen. But the Gossip is still, despite all their pending success, stuck in with the rest of the masses, trying to poke their head above the waves to get people to notice.
So if Radiohead's model isn't the solution, what is? Well, to be quite honest, I don't know for sure. If you can create a system that lets people easily find, discover, sample, fall-on-love with, follow and eventually buy the music of a band who is in control of their own destiny. And do it all under one roof. That's is the future of online music.