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Radiohead

I laugh until my head comes off (Amanda Palmer’s “Idioteque” debuts)

June 11, 2010 by krisis

See that Radiohead lyric in the title? That’s my past two days. Work + House has reached absolute critical intellectual mass. Whatever that means.

I love Amanda Palmer, even if I don’t always love everything she does. When she said her next release would be an album of Radiohead covers on ukulele I was beyond skeptical.

The skepticism has ended – behold, her cover of “Idioteque,” released literally minutes ago.

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://music.amandapalmer.net/album/idioteque">Idioteque by Amanda Palmer</a>

I love it. I just love it. I’ve always loved the song, but the icy, withdrawn version on Kid A has never totally connected with me. Amanda’s sounds instantly familiar, as if it was the version I was hearing in my head all along.

For more on her upcoming album hit her “Idioteque” blog post; of note:

[buy “Idioteque for] a minimum donation of 40¢ (9¢ going to radiohead and the rest to paypal)

the album will be available … for a minimum donation of 84¢…some stuff i’d like you to know about that 84¢:
– 54¢ of it is going directly back into radiohead’s pockets (the cost of selling my covers of their songs)
– the remaining 30¢ will be going to paypal to cover the transaction fee

There is no physical release beyond a limited edition LP, and anything beyond the minimum donation for digital is 100% gross profit for Amanda, which will help her recoup her production costs.

Is this the new model of indie music? I hope so, as it’s exactly what I would do. I guess we’ll see soon enough.

Filed Under: music biz, thoughts Tagged With: dresden dolls, Radiohead

Trio Season 6 – Suite #6: Instants

November 10, 2008 by krisis

Trio: Season Six, Suite #6: Instants
All This Time, Time Is Running Out (Muse), Will It Ever Come?

This Trio almost wound up being titled “Primer” because of the following three quotes:

On being primed:
If you’ve ever read an interview with a songwriter … you’ll hear a repeated theme: that you have to constantly be writing, and constantly be revising and playing. It seems sortof counter-intuitive, because at some point you’ve written a certain amount of material, and you feel like you should be playing or rehearsing that material. But … when you have a new idea it’s much more easy to capture that idea.

It’s funny that you can apply any kind of science to songwriting. You spend a lot of years as a songwriter thinking it’s just lightning that strikes you, but there are things you can do to make yourself more of a lightning rod.

All This Time
When the chorus came in my head I literally walked to the piano and played the entire song in one go and wrote the lyrics. It all happened in 30 minutes. … Effectively the whole song came at once. It was because I was primed. That’s the challenge, you know? You have to be working on songs to have other songs that work.

Will It Ever Come?
Much like “All This Time,” it came at this point that I was very primed, in the summer of 2000. I wrote a lot of what are still my favorite songs at that time … songs that I really still play very frequently. And this one was kindof in the middle, and it just got ignored. It was at the very beginning of Crushing Krisis and I blogged the lyrics. [Ed note: Literally; I wrote them out in nine minutes in the Blogger window. They were my 81st post.]

The next year when I went into the recording studio … I can honestly say I don’t know that ever played it before. And we did it in one take.

.

Lyrics and chords for “Time Is Running Out” are behind the cut. [Read more…] about Trio Season 6 – Suite #6: Instants

Filed Under: acappella, college, piano, Season 6, songwriting, Year 09 Tagged With: laurel, Radiohead

How Radiohead is trying to rehab a rapidly melting industry (but they won’t go, go, go).

October 1, 2007 by krisis

(1) One of the major benefits of Radiohead’s release strategy for the forthcoming In Rainbows hit me squarely on my walk to the subway this morning: no leaks.

The release of each of Radiohead’s last three albums has been an event. Not just a manufactured Kanye v. 50 affair, but an honest-to-goodness critical and popular bomb dropped on the record buying public. And, no thanks to their savvy fans, each record tends to leak ahead of the disc release.

I never had the impression that Radiohead minded leakage, per se, with Johnny Greenwood saying the following about a two-month early leak of Hail to the Thief

Shame it’s not a package with the artwork and all, but there you go. I feel bemused, though, not annoyed. I’m glad people like it, most of all. It’s a little earlier than we’d expected, but there it is. (WP)

You can read between the lines there to understand a few things about Radiohead. They value albums as an experience. They enjoy designing the collateral that accompanies them. And, as illustrated by their never-ending iTunes holdout, they aren’t crazy about badly encoded versions of their work.

All three factors lead to a band that’s “bemused” by leaks rather than “annoyed” – they think it’s quaint that anyone is making an effort to obtain an early version of an incomplete product.

By offering a pay-what-you-will download of In Rainbows two months ahead of the physical release the band gets to leak on their own terms. They can independently master their disc and shuttle it straight to their service provider for upload, with no studio interns to smuggle a pre-master or label reps to swipe a final copy.

Furthermore, fans get the music on Radiohead’s terms – not some nth generation digital-to-analog-to-digital transfer encoded to an MP3, but a direct-from-source version engineered to the band’s specifications.

It is, in a sense, the best possible leak.

.

(2a) The Radiohead situation got my awesome co-worker Chris and I talking about the current rapidly-failing state of the music industry.

Record companies sit on what for decades seemed to be an inexhaustible resource – audience-facing intellectual property in the form of sound recordings and publishing rights, and artist-facing deep pockets that control access to big producers and hype machines. However, those resources were inexhaustible only because the means of distribution and production were highly controlled.

As a nominal example, take Fleetwood Mac. Much to my teenaged consternation, for over a decade there was no single greatest hits CD on which you could purchase a particular trio of their biggest classic rock hits, namely “Landslide,” “Rhiannon,” and “Go Your Own Way.” Yes, their single disc hits package leaves off “Landslide.”

Why? Who knows, but it’s as good of an illustration as any of the record companies and their inexhaustible resource of intellectual property, which remained valuable due to scarcity. Scarcity driven by selectively signing bands and selectively releasing their work, by holding on to publishing and sound recording rights, and through cross-promotions and radio payola, to name just a few of the channels metered with a heavy hand by labels.

At the crux of the matter is a business paradigm that’s all sewn up in old media. Record companies still want to act as a broker of music between and artist and their fans, and their preferred method of business is still retail transactions – physical or virtual.

For all the talk of the threat of file-sharing and the relative oligopoly of the digital music market, it’s the business model that’s sucking the life out of the music business. Unless you’re Radiohead (or Ani DiFranco) putting together a gestalt album package, what does album intrinsically mean? Why sell albums? Why sell? Why not let listeners subscribe to an artist like a magazine that doles out singles instead of issues?

Because that system doesn’t really require middleman, does it?

.

(2b) Recently the tables have turned on the record industry and its previously inexaustible seat of power.

iTunes is returning the business to it’s single-oriented 45 days, killing per-track margins. Its a la carte nature combined with p2p makes it harder than ever for companies to reap extra album sales by repackaging the same release or through judicious exclusion of key tracks.

Meanwhile, songwriting artists are wising up and shopping to smaller labels and imprints to get more out of their publishing rights or make deals to own their own masters, and label power over FM radio is being eroded by satellite, internet streams, and the almighty iPod.

Suddenly that seemingly never-ending glacier of resources is melting at the labels’ feet while marquee names like Madonna take their business elsewhere because their major moneymaker is no longer their records but their overall brand. Artists major and minor are increasingly make their living from merchandise, publishing, and live shows, painting labels quite plainly as outmoded loan sharks hoping to advance money and support in exchange for the brand and intellectual property. And, the artists are finally – rightfully – balking at the concept.

They no longer need labels – labels need them.

.

(3) Of course, record labels know they are about to be sitting in a lukewarm puddle resources, and they’re taking every action to prevent their leverage from melting.

Amy Winehouse was withheld from the American market for years after her strong debut with Frank, including several months after her blockbuster sophomore effort Back to Black dropped in the UK to massive acclaim.

Why wait? Universal Island wanted to drum up a perfect storm of stateside media coverage for their critical darling, and they wanted to ride a huge post-Grammies wave of attention on other UK imports who recently followed the same strategy: Gnarls Barkley, KT Tunstall, and Corinne Bailey Rae.

Amy shipped a big hit – score for Universal. However, it was just a single disc, and Amy hasn’t been anywhere near a studio for follow-up due to her whirlwind US promotional efforts. Six months later she’s canceled her first major headline tour for a stint in rehab, and is being haunted by bad press wherein her family is urging listeners not to buy her record until she cleans up her act. Universal Island is now pushing out Frank to American soils, but there’s no telling if she’ll be good for a follow-up hit.

None of that is the label’s fault, per se. What is their fault is letting the business artificially lead the music – trying to manufacture a hit with art that was already in the world by keeping Winehouse bottled up in the UK when she was fierce and ready to tour behind a fresh disc.

America got her second-hand, and it shows.

.

(Epilogue) Radiohead is engaging in the antithesis of the Winehouse strategy – they’re letting the music drive the business, and it makes an astounding amount of sense. Release digital the second the disc gets out of mastering to hit rabid fans and major tastemakers. Then drop a special package for the die-hards and collectors. Finally, after drumming up a holistic, naturally occurring storm of interest, release a more traditional version of the disc for retailers to shill to the masses.

Not only does it make sense, in that order no one feels slighted by buying all three releases – no one is getting teased out by eighteen extra-special limited edition versions of the disc, it just runs a natural course: leak, premium, normal.

Kudos to Radiohead for breaking free not only of their label, but of the industry paradigm. I hope everyone votes early and often with their wallets handy.

Filed Under: essays, Year 08 Tagged With: Madonna, Radiohead

Radiohead & Rsizr

October 1, 2007 by krisis

Before I fall hopelessly behind the rest of the blogging community by four or five two or three hours, please let me make you aware of the following two things:

(1) Radiohead’s new album, the improbably cheery-named In Rainbows, is available for pre-order. It includes some of the tracks I heard them play at Bonnaroo in ’06.

The fascinating bit about this is actually three different bits:

  • (a) The pre-order is being conducted only through Radiohead’s web site;
  • (b) The album is available as a digital download (on 10/10) or a hefty-priced CD/LP set (on 12/3);
  • (c) You can pay what you please for the download.

Says the band, “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days”

Please stand by while the heads of the entire record industry explode.

Coolfer had some thoughts on that topic. Gorilla v. Bear has photos and specs.

(2) Last month I linked to a video of a jaw-droppingly smart image resizer that scaled images down not proportionally, but by eliminating areas with the least important data.

Well, per Mashable, now you can give it a test-drive in your own browser at rsizr.

The tool is a little unwieldy as a browser-based app, mostly because it’s extremely processing intensive, but it’ll give you a good real-time sense of its capabilities. I gave it a quick spin with our happy hour shots and came up with the following; notice how much slimmer the right side is on the second photo:

I don’t have the mental fortitude to put together an entire walkthrough right now, but the gist of it is that you visit the site, and load an image. You can do something basic like resize or crop, but for this exercise you want “retarget.”

When you choose that option you’ll get two sets of sliders. They represent how much of your total pixel width/height you want to slice out of the shot. For this picture I wanted to take out vertical slices to make it less wide while maintaining it’s height; it made a good example because the various lighting fixtures on the ceiling will be left intact by the slicing.

Witness a slice being removed as I nudge the slider up!

After you’ve calculated your allotment of slices you get normal-looking resizing handles, but as you move them you’ll resize by removing (or adding to!) slices rather than proportionally squeezing or stretching the image. Voila:

You can also get into identifying the areas of the image to avoid (like faces, or straight edges) or the ones to prioritize for slicing (walls and ceilings!), but you’ll have to figure that bit out on your own.

Good god, I’m going to sleep.

Filed Under: weblinks Tagged With: Radiohead

Trio: Season Five, Suite #7!

November 26, 2006 by krisis

Trio: Season Five, Suite #7:
Influences (Pt. 3 of 3) – Current
Behind These Hazel Eyes (Kelly Clarkson)
There There (Radiohead)
The Origin of Love (from Hedwig and the Angry Inch)

Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – typically features original songs, but for the third in a special trio of trios I am covering some of the songs that have influenced me and my songwriting. The first two influences Trios featured childhood and teenage influences.

You can download the entire Trio, or start from a past suite of original songs:

  • Suite #1: Identity
  • Suite #2: Elise
  • Suite #3: Hindsight
  • Suite #4: Things Left Unsaid

See the rest of this post for chords to all three songs. [Read more…] about Trio: Season Five, Suite #7!

Filed Under: NaBloPoMo, Season 5, Year 07 Tagged With: kelly clarkson, Radiohead

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