My Response: (see Melvin's comments in previous post)

Date : 28-Mar-2008 03:59 AM
Topic : Re: Radiohead - goodwill gesture or gimmick?

i think a far more nefarious act was that of EMI (Radiohead's former label) releasing a 7 disc box set of Radiohead's previous albums, riding on such hype and popular sentiment to cash in on the occasion.

your question on whether it is a "goodwill gesture" or "gimmick" is to me, a non-issue. it is clear that such an act was a marketing ploy to generate hype, and i concede that yes, it could be down to profit motivations that the act has decided to release the discset.


but, i feel that the idea i get from your argument in the sense that the consumer is being put at ransom due to the exorbitant price of the "discset" is too far-fetched don't you think? for to a normal layman, s/he can just walk over to the nearest gramophone, hmv, or what not to get the album at 20 dollars or so as an alternative to buying the "limited edition" set.

what i personally saw was that they were pioneering an effort towards an industry shift in focussing towards marketing through the web domain and instead of putting the artiste (and consumer) under the hegemony of the record label, as conflict theorists might subscribe to the various examples of the capitalist means of such labels vehemently looking at meeting bottomlines and targets without much consideration to the individual artiste's own artistic value in creation of the product. an artiste under a label were only considered valuable if they could bring commercial success.

however, the a new industry paradigm is emerging through the vast nature of the world wide web, in a sense that you can see symbolic interactionism at play, with consumers utilizing the bittorrents and whatnot, to somehow signal a shift in popular culture of music consumerism. it is no longer restricted to your record store per se. consumers now have a choice and chance to listen/preview to an album, and if they like it, then buy it.

over the past year, only 3 albums have exceeded the 3 million album mark in sales, suggesting the decline of the record industry if it were to continue to propagate its ethos through such increasingly arcane and redundant means of commoditisation by the record label through stores.

thus picking up the theme of your "goodwill gesture", could you thus translate Radiohead as inadvertantly (intentionally or not )picking up the mantle of working for the independent artiste's cause? for such success of the strategy utilized by thom yorke and co, signalled the strength of marketing through the Net, thus creating opportunities for those at the end of the spectrum, who would have never gotten the chance to be picked up by a record label, the "struggling artistes" so to speak, to tell them "hey you can do it this way". (even though i concede that they might not necessarily have the clout enjoyed by such an established band).

Nevertheless, bands like Arcade Fire and Arctic Monkeys were discovered by the world, practically out of nowhere, through exactly such DIY means. They would almost not be able to be picked up by the goliaths of EMI and Sony entertainment at any rate due to the nature of their music. for music is, at the end of the day, to the purist, for artistic gratis which then, to the conflict theorists, has somehow been grotesquely commodified for capitalist means by the mechanism that is the record label.

hail to the thief

Rant 2:44 PM of Azmie
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Heading :
Lecture 9: Religion and Popular Culture
From : CHEN JUNMING MELVIN
Date : 18-Mar-2008 11:18 PM
Topic : Radiohead - goodwill gesture or gimmick?

Hi:

Radiohead famously released its recent album, In Rainbows, as a digital download. Customers were allowed to pay - before you could even start saying 'symbolic interactionism' - whatever price they wished for downloading the tracks. The lines between producer and consumer were blurred - because Radiohead are not part of a record label (hence separated from the global commodity chain and the nefarious world of media conglomerates), they own the distribution rights to their own songs. Radiohead seemed at that time, with its iconoclastic gesture, to jettison the assumptions of commercialized pop culture, transcending the mainstream (the laity) towards an epiphanic, Platonic ideal of the Form of Good: pure communion between producer and consumer, untainted by pecuniary concerns. Some might even claim (rather perversely) that the act of consumption is being ritualized - as in churches, where tithes and offerings are given according to how much the believer wishes to contribute, the Radiohead fan has the carte blanche, his conscience the sole guide. Better yet, Radiohead may even be construed as messianic music-makers whose money-spinning careers have placed them in the privileged position of offering music gratis to their most underprivileged fans.

However, as with every other product of mass media, there are qualifications. Radiohead offered an alternative package, a 40-pound discbox complete with artwork and extra features. Freed from the straitened rules of record labels, Radiohead creates content and delivers it in a variety of forms, not unlike the conglomerates it has a virulent aversion towards. Radiohead's use of the Internet, a site for globalization, implicates it as a member of the global commodity chain. Radiohead has used its name-your-price download scheme, as critics will aver, to gain free advertisement (hence constituting itself as a free rider of the influential power of the mass media), while at the same time perpetuating commodity fetishism (Marx): Radiohead becomes a commodity that the consumer can unashamedly throw money at. Those sold on the 40-pound package worship the money they were affluent enough to be able to throw at Radiohead.

Music is a resource capable of being infinitely reproducible in this digital age, whereas value and scarcity go hand-in-hand. Therefore, the 40-pound package is a cleverly disguised means to a capitalist end, a deliberately contrived scarcity which is positioned adroitly beside infinite reproducibility (downloading via the website). Radiohead may thus be seen as exploiting the mechanics of desire-production and capitalism to maximal advantage. In packaging themselves as postmaterialist and non-mainstream, they have unwittingly commodified themselves on exactly those terms. Radiohead, in the ultimate gesture of irony, has commodified its own exclusiveness (as an alternative act that religiously shuns popular drivel), and is haunted by the materialism it ostensibly seeks to negate by offering an illusory form of transcendence. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: when the album was released in retail, it topped various charts and garnered critical acclaim. In an age of perpetual novelty, excruciatingly short attention-spans (zero-consciousness) and collective amnesia, Radiohead's In Rainbows, far from venturing into new ground, is precisely the novelty act that the media circus was baying for, a self-conscious, self-aggrandizing materialism which posits itself ironically as anti-materialist. Lavartus prodeo - as Radiohead advances, it points out its mask.

Regards,
Melvin

(P.S.: For what it's worth, listening to Radiohead's music is a transcendental experience, and Thom Yorke is pure brilliance, but this takes nothing away from my view that the name-your-price scheme was nothing more than a clever marketing ploy -> Sociologists must set aside personal biases...lol)

Rant 2:41 PM of Azmie
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