North by Northeast

Spent a good portion of the night in my headphones, after completing a bunch of work for school. After listening to a bunch of Radiohead podcasts (search iTunes to see if they’re still available, I downloaded them months ago) which had rough cuts of all their tracks from In Rainbows, along with video of the band laying the tracks down in the studio, I decided to finally, actually purchase the “new” album at iTunes.

I’m way behind on this, I know.

I should have participated in their “download and set your own price, if any” experiment, to show my support for their innovative attempt at breaking the stranglehold that traditional labels have on music distribution and rights.

Then, once the album was fully, regularly released, I was happy to see it was an EMI track, at least, so that it qualified for iTunes Plus (no DRM, 256kbps). I’ve set out a rule for myself that I no longer buy DRMed stuff.

But to take it to the next level, Radiohead then on iTunes released the “stems” from their song “Nude.” Stems are the individual musicians’ tracks, eg the bass line, the drum track, etc. You could buy them and remix them at will. They would also send you a link to a fully editable GarageBand file to remix. Very cool, except that artists like Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) have already done such experiments, without asking people to pay. The whole experiment is great advertising. I don’t think you should make the participants pay to do your advertising.

http://www.radioheadremix.com/

Never the less the results have been impressive. So many masterfully made tracks, all very different from each other. This week I saw a full-fledged video built around Nude, in a way that defies explanation. You need to watch it. Be patient, it takes about a minute to really get into it. Brilliant.