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.
* iPhone ringtones for $0.99 for 30 seconds. What a rip-off! I’ve always thought that about ringtone companies but I’m used to just using an mp3 as my ringtone. To charge for this is pretty cheeky in my book.
* iPod Nano. Ugly. Proportionally it just looks wrong. Probably need to see one in the flesh but I’m unconvinced by this. It’s gone from sleek and slender to looking like a bastard child of the iPod.
* iPod Classic. New name for the iPod. Nice and gentle re-design, new controls including coverflow but big news was price - £159 for 80GB! £229 for 160GB. I think those are great prices.
* iPod Touch. Big announcement. Same form factor as iPhone so includes touchscreen and coverflow. Also has WiFi and includes Safari and YouTube. £199 for 8GB, £269 for 16GB. The size of the memory was the biggest disappointment for me. If they announced a thicker iPod Touch with 80GB of space then I would have bought one tonight. As it stands I’ll stick to the iPod and pick up an iPhone when it’s released. They are great looking devices especially if you have a small music library or don’t mind picking and choosing music you want to sync with the device. Just not for me.
* Ignoring Starbucks and WiFi iTunes Store I was pleased to see a $200 drop in the price of the iPhone and a scrapping of the 4GB version. No doubt there will be some angry early adopters in America. However, early adopters are always stung, especially by Apple, so they shouldn’t be surprised. They were also quite willing to pay $599 for the iPhone - if they thought it was overpriced they shouldn’t have bought it. Saying that, I’d be pretty pissed if it had happened to me.
A mixed keynote for me but I think it’s cleared up what I’m buying next…although cost and 3G could still be deal breakers. My trusty 6G iPod, only just a year old, will be with me a good bit longer.
So, the big announcement today wasn’t Beatles on iTunes but something far bigger. Firstly all EMI music singles will be available DRM free for £0.99. Not only that it will be encoded at a higher bit rate of 256kbps. All EMI albums will be available DRM free and at the higher bit rate. £0.79 EMI singles at 128kbps will still be available too along with the DRM that is currently employed. You can upgrade any EMI DRM’d music that you’ve previously purchased on iTunes to the new format for £0.20. All this will be available in May.
About time!
I hate buying music from iTunes and not having it available on the 360 or other devices. The jump in quality is also a nice bonus. Well done to EMI for stepping forward and finally providing DRM free music. I don’t believe that 90% of consumers really said they wanted DRM free music at a better quality and higher price but it suits me. Hopefully some of the other music labels will follow in the coming year(s). So how many people thought it was all marketing when Jobs released his open letter regarding DRM in Feb this year? Ho ho.
Happy 2007 folks. I was going to do a ‘best of 2006′ but to be honest I can’t be arsed and there’s not a lot of Wii time left. So, some things you should have watched, played heard in 2006 were…
Thom Yorke, Life on Mars, Planet Earth, Arctic Monkeys, Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, United 93, Low Winter Sun, 24, Bodies, Children of Men, Snow Patrol, Prime Suspect, Razorlight, Gears of War, Battlestar Galactica.
Time to look forward - no resolutions but some goals which I’ll keep private for the moment. Gives me a bit of leeway for failure
