Much ink has been shed on the subject so I won’t bore you with the back story, but when it comes to the music industry’s nascent relationship with digital distribution, you’d be hard pressed to find an advocate more informed than Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, the author of an impressively articulated essay posted earlier this week on Index on Censorship, a British organization which purports to promote “freedom of expression”.
He knows the process intimately of course and not just because he epresents one fifth of what is arguably the world’s biggest band (sorry U2). Almost three years ago Radiohead unveiled their now-infamous “pay what you want” purchasing model, a move which was both applauded for its ingenuity and criticized for its inability to work for bands that weren’t Radiohead. It was divisive, it was new and it existed independently of the traditional models held by traditional Record Labels. But times have changed dramatically and with their eighth studio album nearing completion, Greenwood has contemplated Radiohead’s role as band, provocateur and business while acknowledging the vast social changes that have occurred since In Rainbows was hailed as a digital revolution.
Writes Greenwood: “Three years later, we have just finished another group of songs, and have begun to wonder about how to release them in a digital landscape that has changed again. It seems to have become harder to own music in the traditional way, on a physical object like a CD, and instead music appears the poor cousin of software, streamed or locked into a portable device like a phone or iPod. I buy hardly any CDs now and get my music from many different sources: Spotify, iTunes, blog playlists, podcasts, online streaming – reviewing this makes me realise that my appetite for music now is just as strong as when I was 13, and how dependent I am upon digital delivery.”
Read the full essay here. It really is fantastic.
