For those who aren’t in the know, the music group Radiohead became very popular in the mid-1990s and has remained extremely popular to this day. Thom Yorke (their lead singer) released a solo album last year which was on heavy rotation for months on the “modern rock” stations. However, when Radiohead the full group recently released their latest album, they decided to offer it for download on their website for “whatever you want to pay.” You can pay as little as nothing or as much as you want and get the full download (all songs in a zip file). They are planning to release some disc sets, but only as a custom job (and a bit pricey at 40£), but they are not doing a regular album release through the recording industry.
Now, this is a very interesting idea in and of itself, but one very interesting sidenote is that I haven’t heard any songs from it or even a mention of the new album on the ClearChannel-owned local “modern rock” station. I have heard one of the tracks on one of the college stations, but considering the group’s level of popularity and the heavy rotation of Thom Yorke’s similarly sounding solo album (called “The Eraser”), it’s a reasonable expectation that the new album would get some mainstream airplay. But it’s not – which is a good example of how mainstream radio functions (which is not to bring the listeners what they want to hear, but to actually sell the songs it is playing – if there’s no profit to be made for RIAA, then the song gets no airplay). This is counter to the common belief that commercial radio is only commercial because it has commercials (i.e. advertisements) played in between songs, when in fact the songs themselves are also advertisements.
I heard a song from this album on the [mainstream] radio today! I guess they had to wait until the actual physical recording was out (loosely December 3rd, even though the digital download was available more than a month ago). Perhaps I was wrong as I can’t see how the RIAA can make money of a Radiohead self-produced “diskbox.”