Official RADIOHEAD thread

[Stefen]

Exclusive: Radiohead Sell 1.2million Copies Of 'In Rainbows'

Gigwise has learnt that Radiohead have sold an amazing 1.2million copies of their seventh album 'In Rainbows.'

The band and their long-term management company Courtyard Management have remained tight lipped about the exact sales figures, seemingly in a bid to add to keep a mysterious air around the album.

But speaking to a source close to the band last night, we've discovered that the Oxford band have achieved this monumental sales figure.

Even if every person who downloaded the album paid just 10 pence, the band will still rake in a massive £120,000. That figure is likely to be higher, with many speculating the average figure will even out at around the £1 mark.

With growing media hype around the release of 'In Rainbows', these unprecedented sales figures look certain to keep on rising. If they finally announce a world tour, audience figures are expected to be higher too.

Thom Yorke and co. will cash in again when the payments clear for the 'In Rainbows' box set which are on sale for £40 a go.

As expected, Radiohead are the clear victors of this radical way of releasing their album. Their success should prompt other big names to follow suit.

http://www.gigwise.com/news/37670/exclusive-radiohead-sell-12million-copies-of-in-rainbows

Most awfully "wroten" article I've ever read, but interesting nonetheless.



And heres the 'official' artwork.

[pumba]

I wonder if any rich assholes paid like 200 bucks for the album, just for shits and giggles?
Nude is SO good.
I haven't really listened to a lot of Bjork but 15 step sounds a bit like her. If Bjork married thom yorke her named would be Bjork yorke? Zing!
Also, does House of Cards remind anyone else of the end of My Morning Jacket's "I will sing you songs"?

[cron]

anyone else feels that in rainbows will get jealous if you play any other album?

[tpfkabi]

house of cards = space marvin gaye

3 listens, i lurve it.

[grand theft sparrow]

anyone else feels that in rainbows will get jealous if you play any other album?

Let's just say that I tried to put Kid A on after Videotape ended for the fifth time today and I just couldn't bring myself to do it. 

[bonanzataz]

And heres the 'official' artwork.

[Sunrise]

This is their best record...and I think that is Balthazar laying down to die on the cover art!!!

[tpfkabi]

any idea what the little W is in the bottom left corner?

[MacGuffin]

A Conversation with Jonny Greenwood
Source: gothamist.com

Jonny Greenwood was named the BBC's composer-in-residence in 2004; during this time he debuted "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", a twenty-minute work for string orchestra inspired, in part, by the phenomenon of white noise and Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima". Tickets are on sale for a two-night performance of the composition at The Church of St. John the Apostle in January as part of The Wordless Music Series; works by John Adams and Gavin Bryars will also be performed.

We spoke with Greenwood this morning, which happened to be the same day his side-project – a little band called Radiohead – unveiled their seventh album, In Rainbows, via digital download. It's being sold online only at the moment and – did you hear – buyers are welcome to pay whatever they want! Hm, good luck with that chaps. Might want to tell your business manager to ease up on the amazing mushrooms he's been munching.

Parts of Popcorn Superhet Receiver sound cinematic to me; I know you've done the soundtrack for the new PT Anderson film There Will Be Blood. Did you have any visual images in mind when composing Popcorn Superhet Receiver? No, the opposite really. It's more about radios and radiowaves and hearing music that isn't there.

Hearing music that isn't there? Yeah, like the noise from a radio in the background. Or when you hear a popular song that you think you know over the back of a car engine or spilling out of someone's walkman. So it's weird that you say that; there was nothing visual to it. That's interesting.

Where did the title come from? I had a whole page full of radio-related words and a superhet is a kind of radio that seemed to fit with what I was writing.

What kind of radio is a superhet? It's a short wave receiver. I don't know how it works or why, I just had it scrawled in my notepad, along with other words like VHS and that kind of thing, you know. Superhet seemed the most suitable.

How have you revised the composition since it premiered in 2005? It was revised for the last performance; I just cut out some of the more obtuse parts of it. Partly because I find it hard to write music that isn't just in three minute sections. So now I've arranged it so hopefully over the whole twelve minutes it's got some shape to it.

So now it's twelve minutes as opposed to twenty minutes? Yeah, it's just a bit shorter. I forget how long it used to be; it was about fifteen minutes I think. Like I said I tried to arrange it so that it's set as one thing flowing into another instead of different sections stuck together, which is how it began really. The new arrangement is just a way to try and do something on a larger scale that goes on for longer but still has a structure that holds your interest and hopefully takes you somewhere.

Is it exciting or nerve-wracking for you to sit in the audience and hear your music performed as opposed to being on-stage? Yeah, you feel very self-conscious even though nobody's watching you. It's sort of a personal thing and it's quite odd to involve all these people. It's quite embarrassing for me. I don't know. But it's such a magical moment when orchestras start up; when you've got silence in the room, with instruments making a sound together. It's magical for me. So I just get excited about that really and try to ignore everything else.

There is a lot of tension and drama in this piece yet you seem, in public at least, to be rather serene. Is making music therapeutic for you? I don't know, maybe that's true. Maybe people writing lighter music are very angry, violent people. I don't know, that's interesting. Maybe Burt Bacharach writes stuff and then fights. I don't know. For me it just feels like the orchestra is making sounds I really want to hear. That's all I'm thinking about really. It's such an amazing thing; I'm still a bit in awe of what orchestras can do and how much of an event it is. And then when they're playing in a room... You can forget and think that CDs are enough and you sort of don't need to see an orchestra play. But then once you're actually at the performance you realize it's so much more magical than a recording.

I agree; the vibrations that come out of an orchestra are very palpable. Right, you think recordings are so good now but they don't touch you in the same way as all those wooden boxes with the strings strung across them being played by musicians. It's just incredible, really.

So today's a big day? Yeah, big day today. It's the launch. Like a ship.

Seems to be going flawlessly. At least for me, it downloaded very quickly. Yeah, I know, we're all quietly surprised because it's mostly done all on our own back with a small group of people.

I've been able to listen to the album twice this morning. All I can say at this point is WOW. Oh great! A good wow, I hope. We're just really, really relieved that it's out, and people are hearing what we've been listening to for so long.

What's motivating the band to distribute the album this way? Just getting it out quickly. It was kind of an experiment as well; we were just doing it for ourselves and that was all. People are making a big thing about it being against the industry or trying to change things for people but it's really not what motivated us to do it. It's more about feeling like it was right for us and feeling bored of what we were doing before.

Why give people the option to pay whatever they want? It's just interesting to make people pause for even a few seconds and think about what music is worth now. I thought it was an interesting thing to ask people to do and compare it to whatever else in their lives they value or don't value.

Have you gotten any figures of how much people are choosing to pay? No we get the numbers tomorrow supposedly. Yeah, I don't know. The more exciting thing for me is just hearing it on the radio today and knowing it's landed on everybody's desk at the same time. That's what's exciting. But yeah, I'm sure our manager will have some idea soon.

How did the process of making In Rainbows differ from Hail to the Thief? It was more like earlier Kid A stuff, more based in studio experiments and trying out ideas and spending quite a long time. That's what we did with Kid A and Amnesiac.

What song on the album proved most difficult to finish? Even ones that we finished quickly we spent a long time deciding if they were good enough. None of them were easy, actually. Reckoner kind of came together quickly.

Back to the impending PT Anderson soundtrack, it features another composition called Smear. Did you compose that at the same time as Popcorn Superhet Receiver? No, that was a couple years ago, that was the first thing I wrote for orchestra. I wrote it for the London Sinfonietta and ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. It's like a nine-minute piece. I'm really fond of it because I'm really fond of the instruments themselves.

You won the Listeners' Award at the 2006 BBC British Composer Awards for Popcorn Superhet Receiver and part of that was a commission to write a new piece. Have you started working on that? No, it makes me sweat every time I think about it. I must start that soon. Yeah, it's a little bit daunting. I don't know. I'm not one to sit at an empty table waiting for inspiration or something. I had an idea for Popcorn Superhet Receiver about radio frequencies and I wanted to try an orchestra and I was wondering what you could do with strings. So I kind of jumped at the chance to do it. I don't know if it's what I want to do [with the next one]. So yes, thanks for reminding me, I must start something soon on that.

Did your experience as composer in residence serve as extra motivation to compose Popcorn Superhet Receiver or was work already underway on that? No, that was finished completely. I love the orchestra and their patience and they're up for trying new things. They're kind of waiting for the next piece so, yeah, there's a few things I've got to get started.

Are you going to be in New York for the performances in January? I'd love to but I can't really justify the flight just to come to that. I'd feel a bit weird about it. If I was in America already for touring or something I'd love to go but I can't really justify it. It's a shame.

Have you been trying to reduce your use of air travel because of carbon emissions? Yeah, that's basically why. It's difficult because we want to travel and tour and do musical things and we're just looking at ways of doing it without going to the other extreme. It'd be crazy to not tour for that reason but it'd also be crazy to tour in too greedy a way. So we're just working on the balance for it. And I can't really justify going to New York just for my own sort of thing.

Are you working out plans to tour in America at this point? We're talking about touring somewhere in the world next year. Now that the album's out that's what we're talking about. I hope you'll get to see some good shows.

Have you considered doing some sort of carbon-offset thing with touring? We've heard bad things about that. I'm not sure that that's enough; to buy off our guilt with money. That might not be the best way to do it. We're kind of looking at a few other ideas. It's interesting; we've had a report done on touring and how much pollution gets created and what would be the most efficient way to do it: playing small venues or big venues, playing venues inside a city or outside a city, playing a big venue and having lots of people drive a long way to get to see you or whether it's better for us to travel to different places. There are a lot of things to balance out. Whether it's better to play a festival. So we've got to factor that in as well.

Is it better to play a festival? Depends which festival, depends on where it is. It gets kind of complicated. You have to compromise something or don't play at all. I'm sure we'll end up doing something wrong, that's just how it is. It's not going to be perfect by any means. And it's still got to be a good show and be in a venue people can enjoy and get to; that's probably half of it. It's not just about us feeling smug that we've done exactly right in how we've planned the tour.

Yeah, it sounds very complex! Yeah, really complex. Interesting but very complex.

[Pubrick]

any idea what the little W is in the bottom left corner?

waste products?

[MacGuffin]

Radiohead Fans Feel Duped By In Rainbows' Poor Sound Quality, Possible Ulterior Motives
Statements from band's management seem to indicate that downloadable album was just promotional tool for physical CD.
By James Montgomery; MTV

When Radiohead announced last week that they would be releasing their seventh album, In Rainbows, via their official Web site, there was much fanfare and some honest-to-goodness debate about the future of the music industry, the validity of major labels and just how people consume music.

But in the days since that announcement, a whole lot of that fanfare has curdled, thanks to moves by the band and its management that some see as dishonest, distasteful and, well, downright un-Radiohead. The sentiment among many fans seems to have gone from admiration for the group's willingness to let the consumer decide how much to pay for the new album to anger over the low quality of the downloads — and dismay over the band's manager's statement that the you-choose-the-price downloads were just a promotional tool for the release of the physical CD.

The first bone of contention arose October 9 — the day before Rainbows became available for download — when fans who ordered the album (either in its download-only form or as a deluxe, $81 "discbox" version) received an e-mail from Radiohead's official online store, announcing that "the album [would] come as a 48.4 MB ZIP file containing 10 x 160 [kilobits per second], DRM-free MP3s."

To the casual music listener, the e-mail would be little more than an order confirmation (if not, you know, totally confusing), but to a segment of Radiohead's fanbase — aand to anyone who frequents file-sharing sites — it was a call to arms for two reasons.

First and foremost, all of Radiohead's previous albums were already available as MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits per second — the highest-possible compression rate in the format (though still not nearing the quality of a compact disc) — and most file-sharers scoff at anything less than 192 kbps. (MP3 files encoded with a lower bit rate will generally play back at a lower quality — something not readily apparent on tiny iPod earbuds but obvious enough on high-end home stereos.)

Second, most took issue with when Radiohead chose to announce that In Rainbows would be available at 160 kbps — after the majority of their fans had already paid for the download. To be fair, however, the band did give potential customers the power of choosing how much they wanted to pay to download the album. It could be had for as little as the transaction fee of 45 pence, or roughly 92 cents. There was also an option on the Web site to cancel orders; though, given the timing of the bit-rate announcement, fans had less than 24 hours to do so.

"Most promo MP3s come at a higher bit rate," wrote the author of U.K. blog Kids Pushing Kids. "Worst pound and pence I've ever spent."

"Radiohead has such delicate music that requires detail and depth of sound. ... I for one CAN tell the difference between 160 and 192," responded one commenter. "[With] 160 you can't hear the finer details that make Radiohead so great. I have lost a bit of respect for Radiohead for this. I would never make people pay for 160. They may as well just stream stuff off MySpace."

No one seemed to understand why Radiohead decided to release Rainbows at 160 kpbs, though guitarist Jonny Greenwood told Rolling Stone, "We talked about it and we just wanted to make it a bit better than iTunes, which it is, so that's kind of good enough, really. It's never going to be CD-quality, because that's what a CD does."

That explanation didn't fly with some fans, who began speculating that the decision was made to keep the album off P2P sites or as a subtle way of making fans purchase either the discbox or the physical release of the album next year. The thought behind this theory was that if Radiohead fans were willing to split hairs over something as seemingly inconsequential as kilobits per second, then surely they wouldn't mind shelling out cash for the actual CD version of Rainbows.

And, as it turns out, the latter speculation seems to be true — especially after comments made by the band's managers, Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge, began to make their way around the Internet on Thursday (October 11) — which brings us to bone of contention number three.

In an interview with U.K. trade publication Music Week, Hufford and Bryce spoke at length about the downloadable version of Rainbows and how it plays into the larger plan of releasing a physical copy of the album in stores next year.

"In November we have to start with the mass-market plans and get them under way," Hufford told the magazine.

"If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn't do what we are doing," Edge said.

To many, those comments sounded strangely, well, capitalistic and seemed to confirm that the lower-quality downloadable version of the album was little more than a promotional tool for the actual CD. (It didn't help that Edge is quoted as saying that "CDs are a fantastic bit of kit. ... You can't listen to a Radiohead record on MP3 and hear the detail; it's impossible.") And if that was the case, it probably would've been nice if the band — or its management — had let fans know before they paid (or, you know, didn't pay) to download it. Attempts to contact Edge for clarification on his comments were unsuccessful at press time.

Is this entire backlash really just glorified nitpicking, or do members of Radiohead Nation have a legitimate reason to think they were duped? Well, the answer in both cases is probably "yes."

On one hand, the main reason so many are upset (the 160 kbps thing) seems rather inconsequential, especially given the fact that most people downloading Rainbows are going to be listening to it on their computers or a portable MP3 player. But there is a slightly noticeable difference between a 160 kbps-encoded song and, say, one encoded at 320 (it's heard most easily when played on a stereo). And Radiohead have yet to really offer up any plausible explanation for why they even chose to go the 160 route, especially since their entire catalog is already available at 320.

Furthermore, had the band announced the sound quality before people paid for the record — and if its managers had made the download sound like nothing more than a glorified demo a few days earlier — would 1.2 million people (as is being reported) still have made the decision to download it on the day it was released? Well, probably not. But really, who knows?

In the end, it's really all about a series of intangibles — kilobits per second, fan loyalty, etc. — that makes it difficult to tell if Radiohead fans are upset because of a whole bunch of miscommunication, or if there was some less-than-honest business being done by a band not exactly known for being cold and calculating. Then again, it's also entirely possible that Thom Yorke and company tried to do something different with Rainbows, and as is the case with being first, they might not have gotten it right.

"I paid zero, nothing, nada for the album," one fan wrote on an epic Stereogum thread about the album. "Sounds like Radiohead. But 160 kbps, that's not good enough. They are actually forcing us to buy the CD when it comes out."

"Do not buy the record then. Was that not the point? Don't go around complaining like they did you a disservice by making an album available," another countered. "As if you wouldn't have downloaded the leak. Would you complain if you got the album for free and actually listened to the music instead of focusing on 160 kbps? Maybe you'd actually remember what music appreciation was and be forced to buy the album based on that notion instead."

[Pubrick]

this is a really complex issue.

first of all, it's no coincidence that a lot of you are noticing the bitrate problem. unless you buy all your music on CD, or you have a hearing problem, if you can't tell the difference between 160kbps and 192 then you're really not a fan of music. it is instantly noticeable on a stereo, in a car, even on the not-that-great speakers and sub i use for my computer. also on good headphones.

i don't use itunes cos i don't have/want/need a mac or an ipod, so i'm not sure if they're saying that itunes offers their songs at a lower quality than that. is it only samples they're talking about, or the shit you pay for? cos you really shouldn't pay for such mediocre quality. they're right about might as well putting it on myspace.

it sounds like a brilliant ploy, like stefen said way earlier when he realised ppl were basically duped to pay for what they were going to steal anyway, at a shittier rate to almost GUARANTEE that many of them would end up buying the CD. fuck it, i'll just steal the better version when it comes out. this is almost as bad as when the unmastered HTTT leaked. remember how they were mad about that? yeah, now they just did it to themselves. and that's what really hurts.

i still haven't heard the album.

[Ravi]

If the downloads were truly intended to be the product itself and not a promotion for the CD or LP, they could have offered the songs in the lossless FLAC format.

I can't bring myself to pay for mp3s.

[SoNowThen]

Did it to themselves kind of makes it sound brilliant. Like, "you fuckers keep stealing our shit early and downloading it for free, so here, cat's out of the bag... and it's worse than normal download quality. So next time learn to be patient and wait for the fucking cd." Or something like that.

It could be a very complex morality lesson.

At any rate, doesn't iTunes give us our music at 128kbps??? I can't hear any "bad" sound quality with the version I downloaded (for free, from Pirate Bay), but I always planned on buying the cd anyway, as I do for all albums by bands I like. Plus, I think my ears are fucked. I remember with early mp3's I could hear the tinny sounding drums or high end guitar stuff, but I never hear those imperfections with my ipod stuff.

Dunno...

[Stefen]

Matt explained the iTunes thing pretty good earlier. The 160kbps is better than iTunes, but barely. You can definetely tell the difference, and some songs sound very "caved in" and I can GUARANTEE that is because of the quality.

Yeah, it was a gimmick from day one. I'm glad I canceled my discbox order when I did (you can't cancel them now), but like I said before, beggars can't be choosers. The fact that Radiohead tricked all the indie net kids who steal music into paying for it was pretty genius and you can't hate on that especially since most of these kids deserved to get checked and wrecked.

Still an AMAZING album and I'm getting VERY close to giving it a perfect score. Quite possibly the only thing holding me back is the small bit of me that hates myself for falling for the gimmick.