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No, you can’t have our music for free
Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys once said that what he most admired about U2 was not their music, or Bono’s voice or charisma, but their ‘fantastic marketing’. This was around the time that U2 had very successfully managed to present their Rattle and Hum album as a significant cultural event – a big artistic statement about their musical debt to America – when it was really just a self-indulgent hotchpotch of live tracks, cover versions and a few new songs, a holding operation between proper albums.
Listening to people bang on endlessly about the new Radiohead album – it still hasn’t stopped, several weeks on - I keep thinking of Rattle and Hum. When the dust settles, I wonder whether In Rainbows will finally be seen as what it is - the least artistically significant album Radiohead have recorded to date. Ok Computer and The Bends were, pretty indisputably, classics, and hugely influential, for better or worse (which possibly depends on how much you like Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Embrace etc). Kid A and Amnesiac - two parts of one very long double album, really - were a dramatic leap into electronica, if only groundbreaking in the sense that it was a stadium rock band doing it instead of Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin. Hail To the Thief found a middle way between the old and new Radiohead. And In Rainbows is more of the same, basically, but with some strings on it. Much of it is great (it’s growing on me with every listen) but if it had been released the usual way - with Q, Word and Mojo fighting over who got the first cover story - I suspect the consensus would have been that it was just another Radiohead album, and not quite as exciting or important as the others. Instead everyone is positively salivating over how revolutionary and cutting edge and punk rock the band are being, and, yes, what a big cultural event In Rainbows is.
But they’re not really breaking new ground here. Jane Siberry did this two years ago - and went much further, in fact, deciding to sell her entire back catalogue on a ‘pay what you like’ basis, and selling her house and most of her possessions while she was at it so she could travel the world as a wandering minstrel. Now THAT is revolutionary. All Radiohead have done is be canny enough to recognise the way the commercial wind is already blowing, and follow it. Millions of people are downloading music for free instead of paying for it, resulting in a huge drop in CD sales. So they made a decision, as far as I can see, to cut their losses. But they also saw an opportunity to do something smarter than that - they persuaded many of their hardcore fans to pay almost three times what they’d normally pay for an album for the ‘deluxe’ edition, while those same hardcore fans marvel over how generous and anti-capitalist Radiohead are.
A brilliant marketing and publicity stunt, all in all. People who would have downloaded it for free anyway, or got a friend to burn a CD, can do so without fear of repercussion - or pay a couple of quid as a token gesture to make themselves feel better, meaning Radiohead are then quids in. Radiohead can flog a £40 special edition of the album and get no grief for charging their fans that much - the very opposite, in fact. Potentially they win a whole new audience of people who download the new album for free and then buy the other ones (as Jane Siberry did – she reckons she makes just as much money from her back catalogue now as she used to).
Best of all, the band have got huge amounts of publicity without having to do any press or TV (which they hate doing anyway, by all accounts) or even spend money on PR or advertising. They also got to pre-empt any negative reviews, to bypass the music press’s influence completely. And everyone is so dazzled by the supposed audacity of what they’ve done that their motives have barely been questioned at all.
Is that too cynical? Possibly. And probably too hard on Radiohead, a band I have loved for years. But what sticks in the throat slightly is the way this has been talked about so much as a revolutionary moment in the music industry – the victims here, I’ve heard it said a lot in the past few weeks (usually with a kind of triumphant, stick-it-to-The-Man glee) are the big record labels who have been charging too much for music, and offering bands shoddy deals. This is about musicians taking control of music away from the suits, or something.
It really isn’t. It’s about a particular group of musicians who are all approaching middle age and treading water artistically - Oasis, the Charlatans, Travis, Prince, Radiohead too arguably, although that’s the kind of suggestion that gets you hate mail – cutting their losses for the sake of an attention-grabbing, back catalogue flogging publicity stunt (something they are only able to do because the record companies they are supposedly rebelling against have invested so much time and money in them already). Radiohead are doing it with a bit more style than the others, but what they all have in common is that they are helping to legitimise the idea that people should feel entitled to get music for free. And the people who potentially suffer most from that are musicians who can’t afford to give away music for free (particularly bands who make more money from selling recordings than they do from playing live – and yes, I do mean us, among many others)
Boo hoo, you might say, and you might be right to say it. Pop music is a market, where only the fittest survive, and Radiohead et al are just finding creative new ways to compete in that market. But let’s be clear about what this is. It is not punk rock. It is not anti-establishment. It is the very opposite. It is the establishment protecting its own interests at the expense of others.
Maybe this year will be remembered as a turning point for the music industry, though. Who knows where it will all end? Maybe in 20 years there will be no more pop stars, because it will no longer be possible to earn a star’s salary from making pop music. I could live with that – the result, in the long term, could be a level playing field, where people make music for its own sake rather than for maximum profit, people pay when they feel like it, and the music made is more interesting as a result, even if (or possibly because) it’s done on a lower budget. Pop music will effectively become folk music, songs spreading by word of mouth. Or maybe pop music will, once again, become the preserve of TV talent shows - this being the only way for performers, robbed of income, to get exposure - while really interesting musicians wither away in obscurity. Perhaps it will depend on what you mean by ‘obscurity’, and the value you place on reaching a big audience - and being seen to reach a big audience.
The point is, this year’s trailblazers are no nobler than the record companies whose future everyone thinks they’re jeopardising. The In Rainbows story isn’t about rebellion and revolution, it’s about marketing, money and middle-age.
Meanwhile, if you want to listen to OUR music, you can bloody pay for it, ok? Unlike Thom Yorke, we need the cash.
Andrew
