Radiohead, the once cool but now crap alternative band for the angst of my generation, have done something quite cool again this past week.
In a world where everything can be downloaded from the net at no charge and at no risk bar a few Trojans – viruses, not condoms – they’ve decided to heed the age old adage of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ by offering their latest album online for free download before it hits the shops. The cool bit is you pay as much or as little as you want for it. It’s totally up to you.
Naturally, Radiohead fans have wet themselves and crashed the website in a rush to download the album. They’re an honourable lot too with most of them admitting that they paid nothing, bar the 40p transaction fee to download it. So there you go, even when you offer a geek the chance to be honest he doesn’t take it. How low will these people go I ask myself?! Oh the inhumanity of it all. But Radiohead don’t seem to care, they made trillions from their first couple of albums before it all went to shit, musically anyway, so I suspect the income factor on new recordings is not high on the priority list for them these days.
The music industry has freaked though. James Blunt for one has done his nut which is a bit rich coming from a guy who can lay claim to being the most played but equally most hated artist out I reckon. Maroon 5 would be a close second in my book - does any other band actually sound like they're giving each other a blowie whilst they play as much as those dudes?! Blunt must be doing alright though because he seems to hook up with some fantastic birds. He either has a huge chopper or a tiny one and like Tom Cruise, pays his missus for a little more than just the housekeeping.
Record companies have poopooed The ‘Head for making their music free to all because from their point of view ‘it sets a dangerous precedent’. You bet your arse it does! It means that other bands might take up the cause and start offering their new music direct to the listener, the fan, the consumer at a cheaper rate than the $30 we pay these days for a piece of coded plastic. Every bugger who touches the recording after the actual artist adds a 100% mark up to the cost of a CD, you can be sure of that. In this day and age there is simply no need for a recording to pass through so many hands anyway, not when it can be marketed direct to my living room via the intraweb.
And for an industry that talks a big game about dealing with piracy, I don’t see or hear many artists taking the same stand Radiohead has. Why don’t successful bands put pressure on their record labels to lower the wholesale prices of their music? It sure won’t stop the freeloaders but it’s a damn good start for people like me who actually want to reward the artistic endeavour it took to write an album full of original music and want to pay something for it. Releasing your music legitimately online it seems is only a path taken by the struggling to break it artist and the savant act like Radiohead, who don’t give a rats about the money or the sales any more.
One new release you’d have to pay me to download though is the new Nicky Watson calendar *shiver*. If Nicky Watson is New Zealand’s answer to Pamela Anderson then I want to know what the fucken question was and who asked it?! For all the naive, easily influenced young ladies out there reading this – Ames, that means you – here’s a free insight into the mind of the quintessential ClubDes man and hopefully some peace of mind for you: We don’t dig football size bitty and most men don’t. Over rated rock band drummers do, but that’s because they were breastfed well into their teens and exhibit the mentality to prove it. The only guy who enjoys seeing girls with a rack you could hide a small Asian family between is the surgeon who pockets twenty grand to implant them.
Watson must be getting desperate for the money too because in her calendar she is as airbrushed as one of my old 1/24 scale Tamiya models. She looks more look 3D rendered porn than she does real which will no doubt please those into 3D porn, an audience I suspect not too far separated from those that find Nicky ‘all that and a bag of chips’ anyway. 3D porn aye, what is up with that?! Now I can understand an animator getting a little bored in his downtime and rendering some girl on girl action late one night, we did the same in the back of our maths books at school. But now it’s gotten well out of hand. Why would anyone choose a drawing over the real thing when there’s so much of it on offer? For free even.
Maybe it harks back to the early days of a boys sexual awakening when the first girl he ever had a semi over was Daphne on Scooby Doo and her knee high boots. The minx. She was gagging for it too. Even now, on the odd occasion, Kim Possible in her cheerleader uniform can get a fella a little bailed up in the morning…
Or so I'm told.
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