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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