Category: Music

I finally got around to ordering a bunch of new music CDs, including Stereophonics‘ most recent album, Pull the Pin. In the process of doing so, I made a few interesting discoveries:

• For purchasing a single CD, it is now essentially cheaper for me to order CDs online and have them shipped (even with a $3 shipping and handling charge per CD) than to drive to a music store and purchase it. A combination of my car’s mediocre fuel economy and, bizarrely, the lack of decent record stores close-by in one of the more densely populated regions of the country, are responsible for this.
  
• It is much, much faster to browse by artist online than it is in a store. Additionally, since you can get audio samples of CDs online, the old advantage of being able to preview CDs in-store vanishes.
  
• The only area where brick-and-mortar CD shopping still makes a lot of sense is if you are either buying a lot of CDs at once, or if you are just browsing for random things. Since many of the bands I like do not get wide/timely releases in the US, the “day 1 advantage” of buying things in a store is essentially gone.

As far as the album goes, I have to say it’s not as strong as the previous album (Language. Sex. Violence. Other?). The album is pretty front-loaded, with the latter half being fairly drab. Also, Bank Holiday Monday is so Oasis-inspired as to be almost tacky (compare the choruses to this and Bring It On Down and see if you don’t agree). But hey, it’s not too bad, so I’ll sit back and enjoy it while I wait for the rest of my newly-ordered CDs to arrive in my mailbox…

If this is to be believed, Radiohead are now approximately $10 million richer.

I’m also a cheapskate, apparently, because I only forked out 2 quid. The album’s alright, BTW.

The Compact Disc is increasingly becoming a delivery format rather than a playback format. It’s hard for me to say when this became true for me — probably in the last couple of years, during which time I can’t remember the last time I turned on, much less used, the CD changer in my entertainment center. When I listen to music at home now, it’s always through my computer (either on its own speakers, or channeled into the Xbox 360). I still listen to CDs in the car, but I could just as easily listen to MP3s or WMAs, as my CD player supports them — and actually, to be honest, I listen more to satellite radio now than CDs. CDs in my collection mostly exist for archival and ripping purposes now — my music listening behavior has changed drastically since college, where I would select some music and set it up in my changer before starting another activity like playing a game.
My brother ripped his entire (impressively large) CD collection to a media computer, and I’m starting to think that I need to do the same thing. Apparently he’s also already had CDs that he owns go bad, and I think that I may be in the same boat. (There are a couple of CDs that I have that I know act very strange in certain players, so I’m concerned that they’re decaying. Fortunately, the ones that are suspect are not irreplaceable…)

Radiohead has taken the interesting step of self-publishing their new album in downloadable form, for a user-defined price. People who pre-order the album (due October 10th) are presented with a form where the price for In Rainbows can be filled in, along with a question mark. Clicking the question mark leads to a page that reads, “It’s Up To You,” along with another question mark. Clicking on that leads to a final page that simply reads, “No Really, It’s Up To You.”

(I declared my purchase price to be two quid, which, when combined with the 45p credit card fee and the currency conversion fee from Visa, will probably wind up costing me $6-7 or so. Anecdotally, you could consider this stunt a success, then, as I haven’t purchased a Radiohead album since Kid A, which I loathed…)

I noticed that they left themselves an out — on one of the pages leading up to the album information, they say “So far, it is only available from this website.” (emphasis mine) Since there is a physical version of the album available for order (with CD and vinyl in a special collection), you would think that you will eventually be able to purchase In Rainbows in stores, much like their other albums. By starting with digital distribution through their own site, though, they will make a considerable chunk of cash off of their Net-savvy fans — much more than they would have made off of those same fans buying a CD in a store. I’m still trying to decide for myself if this is just an effective tactic for making money by cutting out the middleman, or a true shot across the bow of the music manufacturing, marketing, and retailing businesses.

Someone started an aggregated list of music videos seen on 120 Minutes. Pretty cool — I spent a lot of time just wading through and watching some of the ones I’d never seen before. A lot of the styles shown in the videos make me laugh now, but of course, they were cool back then. There are also a lot of videos in there that I never knew existed, like the Boo Radleys videos.

Be warned: there are something like 350 videos on that list currently, so be ready to spend some time wading through it…