Ron & Fez just opened with the show a Radiohead song, and my first thought was, “Oh, man, did they break up?” Nope. Phew! But the band will release a new album, The King of Limbs, this Saturday. Exciting, sure. But wait, what’s this? It seems Radiohead has done away with the “pay-what-you-want” gimmick that generated so much heat for its previous album, 2007′s In Rainbows. What gives?

The album will be released with a number of different SKUs. (I suppose SKU would be the term to use here.) There will be an MP3 version ($9) and a WAV version ($14), both available this weekend. There doesn’t appear to be a FLAC version, which is truly mind-boggling to me. Why offer a WAV version but not a FLAC? Beats me.

There’s more. The band will also release the album as what it’s calling “the world’s first newspaper album.” It’ll come with an MP3 ($48) or WAV ($53) version of the album, along with two, 10-inch vinyls, a CD, and 625 pages of artwork. This newspaper album version will be released on May 9.

The only question now is, what will Pitchfork give it? I predict a 48 out of 10.

Famous rock band Radiohead released an album a few years ago called In Rainbows. The band initially released the album online for free. Well, not for “free,” per se, but you were given the option to pay whatever you wanted. That promotion only lasted a little while, as the band later teamed up with traditional record labels (like Warner and Sony) to release a physical album.

Here we are, almost three years later (good God, three years…), and the RIAA and IFPI are now issuing takedown requests to sites that are offering the album online for free. Think Blogger sites and the like.

The question becomes, how does the RIAA and IFPI know that the editions of the album being offered online for free today are the editions that they own the rights to? What if some enterprising youngster downloaded the album for free back in 2007, and now wants to offer it on his or her blog for all the world to download?

How would that even work in court, I wonder? “Your honor, I downloaded the album for free, legally, and then put a copy of it on my Web site. Is that a crime?”

Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t remember the terms under which Radiohead released the album online.

It’s basically a question of, is the RIAA (and IFPI) trying to protect something it doesn’t even have the rights to?

Mm.

“It will be only a matter of time—months rather than years—before the music business establishment completely folds. [It will be] no great loss to the world.” So says Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke, a man who knows a thing or two about how the music industry works.

Yorke made the comments, bizarrely, in a new British textbook about citizenship. My civics textbooks had quotes from the likes of George Washington and Voltaire, so clearly the books in Britain are a little more current.

But is he right? I actually think the music industry has been doing pretty well for itself in recent months. Granted, it took the industry ten years to get its act together, but not everyone is perfect.

How much of the music on iTunes is now DRM-free? Don’t like iTunes? You have options, and options that work well: Amazon MP3, specialized digital music stores à la BeatPort, the Zune Marketplace, etc. Certain countries in Europe even have access to Spotify, which is about as perfect a music-delivery service as I can think of. Will Spotify ever be released in the U.S.? Hard to say, but let’s not pretend that there aren’t alternatives to buying whatever Wal-Mart wants to stock on its shelves.

You’ll also recall that Radiohead, a few years back, released an album online for a whatever-you-like price. (A physical album was eventually released as well.) It was very much a success, but not every band is Radiohead, a band with dedicated fans and who are, I would imagine, more technologically savvy. (I base that on the fact that everyone I ever knew who said Radiohead was their favorite band certainly knew their way around the Internet. Plus, I think I read something to that effect in the book Ripped.)

I do agree with his last bit, that the “loss” of the music industry will be of not great loss to the world. Pretty sure music existed before the RIAA showed up.

While this could have been anything from Kid A, this is actually a version of “Creep” reworked by Microsoft Songsmith and the peppy beats could potentially completely cure the melancholy infused into countless proto-Goths by this moody yet charming band over the years.

The strange thing is this: SongSmith actually brings out some of the original music here but the quality here is nill. It reminds me of chiptunes. I once heard “Closing Time” done on a Gameboy’s audio processor and the song, which is a bit schmaltzy in the first place, sounded like one of the songs the Music Department would would generate for Hate Week in 1984.

I would totally love to hear “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. That it would be so hot to hear Karen O caterwauling over what amounts to being the demo tune for a Casio keyboard.

Warner Chappell, Radiohead’s distributor, is announcing that the band “sold” 3 million copies of In Rainbows, the album that they essentially gave away online in a pay-what-you-want scheme. The reports are that they made more on the album than they did on their previous dumpling, Hail to the Thief. Previous sales numbers were in the high hundred thousands, which makes this move particularly interesting.

The official stats show that Radiohead sold 1.75 million CDs – about $17.5 worth, given the vagaries of CD pricing – and about $499,500 worth of iTunes albums (30,000 sold in the first week plus 20K for good measure). They also sold 100,000 box sets. Clearly, they cleaned up but there are still about a million “sales” left over, not to mention countless pirated tracks floating about. One thing, however, is clear: the process can be successful with the right artist and content. By giving old Radiohead fans the opportunity to add premium content to their shopping carts while allowing folks who maybe liked OK Computer but were pretty angry about Kid A (AKA Me) to give the band another chance. Luckily In Rainbows was sufficiently good to warrant a bit of a push by word of mouth. I wonder, also, how much social networking played into organizing the fan base?

Obviously 3 million purchases, in this case, doesn’t directly translate into a multiple of 3 million dollars. Instead, thanks to the pay-what-you-want pricing you have to factor in freeloaders and the oil-rich oligarchs who could have paid Thom and his buddies $1 million for 15 Step alone. However, turning the metric from “dollars” to “sales” creates an interesting new dynamic in an entrenched industry, adding a whiff of Internet-esque metrics to what has previously been simple manufacturing play.

It’s definitely not your average video considering that there were no cameras or lights used: it’s all data. The video uses real time 3D recording, utilizing structured light and laser-enhanced scanners. Google is hosting the interactive video application at code.google.com and providing an iGoogle gadget for the video and application.

The video was created by music video director James Frost, and the technology was handled by Aaron Koblin, who has done several other visualizations including the well-known flight pattern visualization.

To capture the 3D images, they used a structured light scanner from Geometric Informatics for the close proximity shots of the singers and a Velodyne LIDAR scanner for the landscapes. The LIDAR scanner uses 64 lasers to scan an environment and create an XYZ point cloud of data, which is then rendered and read by 3D software.

Radiohead got a lot of attention when it released its album In Rainbows for free online. This led to a lot of speculation about the future of the music industry and the way people will purchase music.

Since Radiohead identifies itself with the open-source ethos, it’s releasing the video’s data so that developers can remix it and make their own variations of the music video. You can download the viewers and data from the Google Code project page.

That page also has an in-browser data viewer for viewing and interacting with the video. The player is Flash-based, so you can zoom with the mouse wheel, or click-and-drag to move it around. The page also has links to the YouTube video, the YouTube group (for user-remixed videos) and the behind-the-scenes video.

This project may have interested Google because the LIDAR technology used in the landscape and large environment shots is similar to the system Google uses for their Google Maps Street View project. It’s just a very different application of the same technology.

Also see Aniboom’s contest where cartoonists are encouraged to create music videos for Radiohead songs.

Without the use of any cameras or lights, Radiohead has created a new video for its song “House of Cards”.

Wispy points of light capture the ephemeral nature of a party scene as the scanner makes its way through a crowd, eventually ending up outside. Two different scanning systems enable the director, James Frost, to capture the images as they progress from faces to houses in a neighborhood at the end of the cul-de-sac.

In a refreshing merge of tech and no-tech, the making-of video shows the crew physically breaking up the image, by placing various objects in-between the scanner and the subject. A pane of glass with water dripping down it breaks up the image, while another effect is created by waving bits of mirror. The result is an image with a distorted data stream further enhancing the distinctive look.

Check it all out here.

One of my favorite bands from way back when has finally decided to unshackle their EMI catalog and distribute their music through iTunes. Before this, Radiohead (or EMI) was adamant about selling their music bundled and not per track whereas Apple refuses to sell albums as is. You can find all the EMI released albums, the new Greatest Hits album, and videos in the iTunes Plus store. All tracks are DRM-free AAC format.

via Wired

Metallica gave hints in an interview with Rolling Stone that it will follow the Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead model of Internet-based music distribution. (You can already download live show MP3s and FLACs, for the record.) Says Lars Ulrich:

We’ve been observing Radiohead and Trent Reznor and in twenty-seven years or however long it takes for the next record, we’ll be looking forward to everything in terms of possibilities with the Internet.

Unfortunately for Metallica, they released an album called St. Anger back in 2003, universally condemned as the worst piece of recorded music in history. “Madly in anger,” really? What does that even mean?

Oh, and they also helped kill Napster. That’s not how you win friends.

via Slashdot

Radiohead wasn’t going to take upstart Trent Reznor’s sass much longer. The British band loved by everyone trying to look smart has made its third single off In Rainbows available as an instrument-by-instrument downloade—for remixing! Nobody wins anything for their troubles, except placement on the band’s site.

The band calls these separate tracks “stems” and charges you 99 cents for the privilege of downloading each one off iTunes. If you buy all five stems the band, magnanimously, will send you a Garageband file for easy remixing.

Sound familiar? It should! Reznor did a similar thing three years ago with one of the songs off With Teeth. Only Reznor didn’t charge you to download “stems” or any other pseudo-cutting-edge term.

via National Post

As if you already didn’t know, Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails’ frontman, also “gets” it. “It” meaning that the music business, as we once knew it, died some time ago. Also, he thinks Radiohead’s In Rainbows was a stunt more than anything else.

Reznor, in speaking with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, called out Radiohead for releasing its latest album in “MySpace-quality.” He’s referring to the genuinely subpar audio quality of the digital download, which was only a collection of 160kbps MP3s. Compare this to Nine Inch Nails’ latest album, Ghosts, which he’s made available in all sorts of formats, including FLAC, Apple Lossless and 320 kbps LAME MP3. That’s $5 for an entire FLAC album—that’s foresightedness.

Basically, Reznor is saying that Radiohead half-assed it and undeservingly benefited from the hype. (We probably got caught up in the hype, too. What happened to my trademark cynicism last fall?) Note that Radiohead still depends on a record label, while NIN has completely divorced itself from the “inept.”

Let’s not forget that NIN also released the first volume of Ghosts on popular BitTorrent trackers, no doubt winning the band (or however you want to classify it) some brownie points with “elite” music fans.

Good on Reznor.

Reznor: Radiohead offering was insincere, industry is inept [Ars Technica]

Remember the music industry? College kids killed it a few years ago and the top acts are now starting to notice.

U2, covered brilliantly by New York area band 2U, is reportedly thinking about severing its relationship with Universal Music Group. Either 2004′s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” (which wasn’t too bad at all) or last year’s re-master of “The Joshua Tree” (good. quite good.) completed the band’s contract with the record label, and now it’s looking to hook up with some concert promoter to handle the release of its future albums.

They could always go the Radiohead route, but judging by comments made by the band’s manager, they don’t seem too hip to technology. Why would they be?

U2 May Be Next to Leave Record Biz [Fox News]

Despite being released three months ago as a digital download, Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows, was the best selling album last week. That must really upset the big record labels, who for God knows how long have been claiming that downloadable music would be the death of the album, of physical collections of music. Never mind that Radiohead essentially thumbed its nose to the big labels with In Rainbows.

And yes, as I type this I’m listening to the album again. I’ve never been a huge Radiohead fan, so bear with me as I try to “understand” the band’s sound.

Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ tops charts [AP/Yahoo!]

The Radiohead front man explained:

We didn’t want it to be a big announcement about ‘everything’s over except the internet, the internet’s the future’, ’cause that’s utter rubbish. And it’s really important to have an artefact as well, as they call it, an object.

Radiohead sent shock waves across the music industry last fall by independently releasing its long anticipated album “In Rainbows.” The band dropped its old label EMI in favor of the self-release and later signed with two independent labels to distribute physical albums in the US and the UK.

I was at CMJ right after the album announcement and it really was all that anyone could talk about. Even now though, the real effect remains unclear. The band refuses to give a firm number as to how many digital copies were moved. Rumors place sales at around 1.2 million, but Yorke has stated that number to be incorrect — although he could just be being coy.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that we’re in the midst of a sea change.

Web-only album ‘mad’, says Yorke [BBC]

I am in love with this Radiohead 4GB limited edition USB stick. Not only does it look rad, it features all 7 Parlophone albums and includes all of the album artwork. The live album is also included in the bundle and all audio files are WAV so you don’t have to worry about the quality. It’s exclusive to the Radiohead store and going for a massive $166. Yikes! You can also check out a limited edition 7 album box set for a much more reasonable $83 if you’re turned off buy the USB sticks hefty price tag.

Radiohead Store

In Rainbows, coupled with iTunes dropping DRM-free music down to $.99, are clear indicators that we the listeners are winning, and that DRMing music isn’t consumer friendly. It’s good for us, and, as Thom and company are showing, is good for the bands. Keep up the good work, boys. But we really don’t see it applying to video games. Not right now, at least. Since the games are platform specific, the portability problem isn’t an issue. That is, unless something new from Nintendo bridging its platforms comes across, but we’re not holding our breath.

What Can Games Learn from Music’s Mistakes? [GigaOM]

Breaking news, guys. Like, b-r-e-a-k-i-n-g. You may have heard about that stunt Radiohead pulled last week, giving away their music for whatever you feel it’s worth. Well now the pundits are out and have declared DRM dead. Or something!

But seriously, this Wired column opines that, now with DRM-free music everywhere it’s likely that music subscription services will be the victim. Reason being, if all of your MP3s are DRM-free, it opens the door for upstart companies that specialize in online jukeboxes. One such service, MP3tunes, searches users’ hard drives for DRM-free MP3s then automatically uploads them to its servers. You’re then able to listen to the music anywhere there’s an Internet connection. Why pay for something when you get it for free? I’m pretty sure that’s Generation Y’s motto.

Dying DRM Means More Freedom for Music Fans [Wired]

Breaking! Bands and Artists in the recording industry are trying to make money! Apparently, it took days for people to realize that Radiohead’s In Rainbows digital download was a marketing tactic to entice fans to buy the CD. After all, Radiohead is one of those bands with a bunch of cutters and alternative dudes as fans (oh no he didnt’!), so you know damn well they’re going to buy the CD, the 7-inch singles and anything else remotely related to the album or Thom Yorke.

Right, so now the band’s manager is coming clean and is all like, “If we didn’t believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn’t do what we are doing.” His name is Bryce Edge. Isn’t that a kickass name? I’m pretty sure if your name is Bryce Edge, you can sell any damn thing you please.

In the end, we’ll all just end up Bit Torrenting everything. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a Stryper album with my name (and God’s) on it.

Radiohead Management To Fans: Please Buy “In Rainbows” On CD. Please [Idolater]

The pay-whatever-you-want Radiohead album is now available for download. “In Rainbows,” the band’s 10-track, seventh studio album is the first high-profile “name your price” release of an album. You can download it now from the band’s Web site (or, by the time this gets posted, your local file sharing hub) or wait till December to buy a hard copy of the album, complete with an extra CD.

Not being the biggest Radiohead fan (I’ve only listened to, but really liked, “Hail to the Thief”), I have no way of comparing the release to their previous work. This isn’t a music site so that’s not particularly relevant; we’re just happy to see someone show the music business how to properly treat its fans.

Radiohead album goes live on the internet [The Independent]

In Rainbows

Not musically, but how they’ll go about selling their upcoming albums. Brit rockers Oasis and funkadelic party-machine Jamiroquai are slated to release their forthcoming albums directly to their fans on a “pay as you wish” system. The move comes after fellow UK musicians Radiohead used the same tactic to sell “In Rainbows”, which was released today, to fans. As a result, the album has soared to the top of the digital download charts and has shocked the music industry as a whole.

Looks like the RIAA needs to wake up and smell the coffee. Piracy, artists and the fans are changing the way the game is played.

Oasis, Jamiroquai to follow Radiohead [Telegraph UK]