Over its first 24 days, the album notched up 2.3m torrent downloads. Illegally] on BitTorrent on its day of release alone. From NME:Ĥ00,000 copies of 'In Rainbows' were downloaded [ What was really beautiful was that (in my humble opinion, their best record) In Rainbows was released as a surprise with a ‘pay what you want’ model, for the first time in the industry – so not only could fans download it for free, officially, but also unofficially. After that, a period not of consolidation, but continuing to test the edges of the experiment. The invention there made OK Computer possible, up to and including the stretch that their audience would allow for more interesting exploration of styles. The Bends was a remarkable sophomore release. That hit was important, though, because it made getting to a second record easier – it’s not guaranteed in the record industry. That’s still better than Bob Dylan’s first record (mostly covers) or The Beatles'. Their first record was pretty average, but it did contain one hit (Creep). Radiohead do fascinate me, both as a band, and as a business case.
The problem of simply chasing the dollars is that it leads to mediocrity forced down the throats of the market, to me-too drugs that represent not a breakthrough, but a carefully-calculated minimum level of differentiation to force their way onto the shelves. Profiles that we have run on companies like Gilead show the value of a focused passion, a commitment to the work – someone who cares about what is released for a reason other than the size of the dollars. (While acknowledging that there is even more great work going on at an ‘indie’ level at smaller companies.)
On the other hand, there is a lot of great work going on by large companies who do still care – the Radioheads of our space.
There is a lot of lazy thinking going on by some companies where money is everything – the reason they make drugs. It’s about the parallels between some of the behaviours seen at pharma companies. Radiohead won’t make $80million from their next record, but I can guarantee that it will be interesting, meaningful, and the result of a group (of millionaires) making music because it still matters to them, and not just to their bank manager.Īlthough I own an independent record label, this isn’t some sour grapes about arrogant musicians. That doesn’t stop them earning $80million for a single new record – a result of fat and lazy marketing by Apple and what I can only imagine is a huge misreading of how much the listeners of the world wanted that record taking up space on their iDevice. I’d suggest they haven’t made a good one for even longer. U2 haven’t made an interesting record for 20 years.
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