Month: October 2007

Lyon 0 – 3 Rangers

What an amazing result. One of the best from Rangers in a long time, and easily their best result in Europe in recent years. Certainly the most surprising result in the Champions League tonight and also the best performance by a British team. We rode our luck at times but good defence and clinical finishing won the night.

So we’re joint top of the group with Barcelona. Suddenly talk is of qualification and what results we need to go our way. Great times that will hopefully lift their domestic performance. Bring on Barca…gulp!

Breaking Free

Piracy. It’s feared by major record labels who failed to see the potential of the digital market and instead tried to block it. Official downloading is taking off but so many now see music as a free commodity.

Radiohead announced last night that their new album would be available from October 10th as a download only. You have two ways of buying the new album, In Rainbows. You can visit the website, pay £40 and receive the discbox on or before the 3rd December which includes the new album, a bonus CD, 2 12 inch vinyl records, artwork and lyric booklets plus a code that allows you to download the new album on the 10th of October.

The second option is to visit the website, choose download only and pay…whatever you like to receive the download code for the October 10th release date. Yes, that’s right. Choose your own price. You can enter £0.00 if you like and get the album for free. Amazing. Now I’ve no idea whether the album is any good but with an offer like that can you really go wrong? Even if your not a fan it must be worth at least trying?

All this while Radiohead are free from any studio ties as they aren’t signed to any label. Could this be a new way of selling music? Surely this will remove any need to pirate as people will pay what they want for the album even if it is nothing? I can only see them making more money this way despite having to pay for their own server bandwidth. No labels, no distributor cuts and lot’s of people paying quite a bit for the download or like me ordering the discbox for £40. Never did I think I’d pay £40 for an album that I could get for free. Is this another nail in the coffin for the traditional large record labels?

Roll on October 10th. It’s been a long time coming.