New Radiohead Album, I paid £4 but is it worth that?

Some of you will have heard about Radiohead’s controversal new album release entitled "In Rainbows". This is their seventh studio album with their latest to date being "Hail to the thief" back in 2004. The controversy doesn’t come from the music but from the method in with it has gone to market.

The band have released it via their own website with a "pay what you want" approach. I have a lot of respect for the band in doing this. Obviously there will be some people that pay the bare minimum (0.45p credit card charge) but I strongly believe most fans will shell out a bit more.At first I typed in £2 but then thought, "hangon, I love this band I’ll pay a little more. The only reason I didn’t fork out more cash was that I didn’t have a chance to preview any of the tracks and I was a little unsure of what to expect.

I was right to do this as the quality of the downloaded tracks are not CD quality at 160kbps. The full launch is due to happen early in 2008, which is when I’ll propably end up spending another £10 to get my hands on the decent quality versions. Thats quite a clever idea I think but are the rest of the fans like me? Do other people care this much about sound quality? I don’t think so.

Anyhow, I’m loving the album and I’m going to listen to it a few more times during the week to let it sink in.  Four quid is let than a packet of cigarette, bargin!

In other news on a slightly similar topic. James Hurst and Ruth Theodore last night launched River Rat Records with Ruth’s debut album "Worm Food". These crazy cats have opted to release the album under a Creative Commons Licence meaning that you can copy and share the music with your friends. As far as I know this hasn’t been done before and it’s going to be interesting to see how it goes down. Take a look at their website for more infomation.