David Emery Online

Rainbow Day

10 October 2007

I wasn’t originally going to talk about Radiohead today.

It seemed a little too obvious. But sometimes you just have to go where the world takes you.

Today has been all about Radiohead. It has been all about Radiohead everywhere. Since about 7:10 this morning there’s barely been more then a few minutes where I haven’t been able to hear ‘In Rainbows’, whether directly via my iPod or speakers or from another room or on the radio. At any point today when I’ve walked through the office it’s been on in every room; a simple trip to someone’s desk compromising a nice 30 second preview of each track along the way.

Everyone on Twitter I follow seems to be listening to it. Everyone on iChat has had the track names flicking past as their status all day. My Facebook news feed has 11 references to it from people’s status updates.

Radiohead have made recorded music exciting again.

In fact, I think this is the most important aspect of this whole thing. Forget the whole ‘pay what you want’ thing – which is a very interesting experiment, but an experiment none the less (and one which will only work with certain fan demographics). No, by far the best piece of the whole thing is the digital release date – one date, to everyone (including press) with the physical coming later.

It’s made it the most exciting album release I can remember for the last 5 years at least.

Since downloading became a reality there hasn’t been this sense of ‘everyone’s getting it right now’ that you used to feel on a Monday morning when you used to nip to the shops to buy the album you’d been looking forward to for months. These days albums just trickle out, appearing on the internet with little or no fanfare, probably with a mp3 on some blogs and maybe a couple of tracks on the inevitable MySpace. It’s all so unexciting.

The album?

Probably the best thing released this year. Better then Hail to the Thief. Obviously better then Pablo Honey. Possibly better even then Amnesiac.

It is a truly beautiful piece of work.

On a different note, it’s interesting to look at how they’ve delivered the digital release. They obviously have no regard for the medium – which goes hand in hand with the almost throw away ‘pay what you want’ device – as it comes as a basic folder of 160kbps MP3s, with no artwork or any other extras. You could take it two ways really: either they hate or have no respect for digital (which is probably the correct answer) or they want the focus to be solely on the music. That’s all they’re giving you; just the music, nothing else.

It’s a statement I quite like. All the carry through from physical releases like artwork and packaging are in many ways superfluous these days, but without them the music is still perfectly adept and standing up on it’s own. However, for those of you that like your artwork have a look at this post by Jon Hicks for lots of fan made user generated versions to use with the download.