Radiohead Retraction

Wow. Did I ever mis­judge this band. I hereby take it back — almost every­thing I said about them a few weeks back.If you’re not fol­low­ing the Radio­head saga, sev­eral weeks ago, the band made news when they announced they would not sell their new album on iTunes because the store refuses to sell albums as albums, and instead requires artists to agree to sell at least a few tracks track-only, at $0.99 each.I still con­tend that shun­ning track-only sales is silly. But in the con­text of my hyper­bole, I said I’d ignore the band entirely as a result. Then, I went on try­ing to ignore them.I tried hard.A week later, the band announced that, free from their label con­straints, they chose to release their lat­est work on their web­site with — get this — flex­i­ble pric­ing. That’s right: you get to pay Radio­head exactly what you think their album is worth.And then, they went from obscu­rity in the media world of fifth+main to the role of media hero. I did down­load the album, in fact, and I paid absolutely noth­ing for it. I chose to take advan­tage of the kind­ness of the band and gave them a big fat goose egg. Then I lis­tened to it.And I went back and gave them twenty bucks.Now, oth­ers are fol­low­ing in Radiohead’s lead. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor had this to say:

Hello every­one. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the fol­low­ing announce­ment: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any record­ing con­tract with any label. I have been under record­ing con­tracts for 18 years and have watched the busi­ness rad­i­cally mutate from one thing to some­thing inher­ently very dif­fer­ent and it gives me great plea­sure to be able to finally have a direct rela­tion­ship with the audi­ence as I see fit and appro­pri­ate. Look for some announce­ments in the near future regard­ing 2008. Excit­ing times, indeed.

Tele­graph UK notes the Oasis and Jamiro­quai are com­ing along too, which would be a per­fectly right thing to do, since — huh? Jamiro­quai? Where the hell has that guy been the last decade and a half?This is the next most beau­ti­ful exten­sion of the user cen­tered media mar­ket. The labels have cre­ated a firestorm of con­tro­versy around file shar­ing when the upshot is sim­ply this: users want a rela­tion­ship with their con­tent cre­ators. They want a per­sonal and mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ship, and a fidu­ciary one, too. They want to know that the con­tent cre­ators they fol­low are liv­ing off the fruits of their labors, that fans have con­tributed to the suc­cess of their favorite acts, authors, artists.Labels have become the elec­toral col­lege of the con­sumer rela­tion­ship. As we’re see­ing in the polit­i­cal sphere, it just might turn out that the proxy vote doesn’t actu­ally work as well as it used to, that the labels don’t actu­ally know what I like and would spend my money to sup­port, and that in fact, artists are served bet­ter by deal­ing directly with the populace.