In Rainbows or: A short history of copying
Radiohead‘s latest album is out! And I discovered it four days late. But I like their straight way of marketing: The album only comes as download from their website 1 as a nice .zip with ten mp3s in 160kbps quality. How much does it cost? You decide. No really! You decide!
Right now I am listening to In Rainbows for the first time on my crappy notebook speakers and it sounds just a little too good for the first time. That’s what’s bothering me a bit: Radiohead’s music is not really accessible when you listen to it the first time. Kid A and especially Amnesiac needed a couple of listens until the songs began to unfold in their variety and greatness. Songs like these are rare and you can’t over-listen them while very easy accessible songs begin to annoy you after about ten times of listening.
Their style has gotten a little more melancholic than on their albums before, less electronic and a little less avant-garde. At the moment The Reckoner is playing in the background and I predict that in one year from now it will appear in every Zach-Braff-ian chick-flick that will be out there. It’s beautiful, yes. Let’s not tie it to some cheesy young-adult movies and enjoy it for its pure existence without moving pictures of crying waitresses in the rain.
As a true Radiohead fan from the beginning 2 I was feeling rich and pre-ordered the disc box for 40 pounds or a good 50 €. I love special editions of Radiohead albums. I just gotta have ‘em all!
This brings the whole concept of prices set by record companies in jeopardy. I’ve been ranting quite a time about their silly acting when it comes to clinging to their outdated concepts of pricing. Fifteen years ago everything was fine: No internet, no Napster, no MP3 3, no piracy. The good old days when an album was priced about 200 to 250 Austrian Schillings, about 16 € or so. And we didn’t complain. Because it was just as overpriced as dentist bills we’re used to. And because we didn’t have a place to complain. Not many people were using newsgroups back then.
Seven years later in 1999 Napster rocketed and everything changed for us and for them and ultimately changed Sony from a cool, hip and square company into a paranoid dystopian monster who treated every customer, among other companies, as a potential criminal.
But what are record companies anyway? I break it down for you in easy and blunt terms: They copy things. Period. Yes, it’s that simple! Now we can do the copying ourselves and don’t feel like paying a dime for it. No surprise that makes them mad…
Intermezzo: A short history of copying things
Statement I: Then
You made a great song on your banjo in the good ol’ 1920′s. But nobody can listen to your great song about the girl from the southern states. So you sell your soul to the big Mr. Record-Company who owns all the expensive stuff like a microphone and a shellac-disk-processing plant that prints the grooves of your tune into thousands of black disks. Now the consumers who like your song give some of their money to Mr. Record-Company for recording and copying your banjo tune. As a token of good will he even gives you some credit! But needless to say that Mr. Record-Company will keep the gross for himself.
Statement II: Now
You made a great song on your GameBoy in the sparkling and futuristic days of 2007. But nobody can listen to your great song about the alien-girl from the outer planets. So you save some money and buy some web-space and traffic from the small Mr. Webhost and get your hands on an open source shop system. Within a few clicks you can tailor a license for your works under CC, make some noise about your tunes on FaceBook, MySpace and everywhere else that’s buzzing in a glare of short popularity for your fifteen megabytes of fame. Your first album will be free for everyone, the second album will cost 20 cents per track and when you really gain popularity you can sell the album for what people are willing to pay. Strangest thing: This might work!
Exercise:
- How often does Mr. Record-Company appear in the text of Statement II?
- How much money will Mr. Record-Company make in Statement II?
- You think he’s gonna be pissed about that?
Solution 4
Now, thanks to the digital revolution, we can make our own copies and don’t need Mr. Record-Company anymore. But instead of saying something like “Alright! You got me. Let’s start over again completely different and let’s think of something for all of us” 5 the beasts roar up and try to tear out as much money as possible from little girls as a compensation for all the guys they can’t catch. They sacrifice their own customers in a naive attempt to jump back 20 years where they roamed the earth as big, slow and greedy dinosaurs.
What’s my point? The point is that the latest Radiohead album is a good example of shifting products out of the price focus into an understanding of value. How often do you think about the value of something nowadays? My first car, the ’82 Subaru Sedan 1800 was worth about 200 € (when filled up with gas) but its personal value was exorbitant.
That’s also what I pursue on my blog here. You decide how much something is worth to you. So far, it’s nothing of any worth yet. But I hope I can change that for you…
Comments
g0rg (Oct 14, 2007)
in my trip to the middle east, where i had to bargain for everything, i also remembered the value of the things i was buying. i paid as much as it’s worth for me. i guess this will be a big economical topic in general for the next few years.