I won’t buy the next Radiohead release. As a matter of fact, I haven’t thought about Radiohead in years. I remember Radiohead listening parties in college, but since the advent of the iTunes Store, they’ve fallen off the radar.Until this morning, when I had a chance to catch up on the Wired blog. Eliot Van Buskirk has a quick post about how Radiohead has shunned iTunes not because of DRM, not because of pricing, but because the online store refuses to sell their releases as album-only.
According to an EMI, Radiohead refuses to distribute via Apple — even through Apple’s DRM-free iTunes Plus store — entirely because of Apple’s policy of selling tracks individually:”iTunes insists that all its albums are sold unbundled, but 7digital doesn’t.Radiohead prefer to have their albums sold complete. The artist has a choice, and if they feel strongly then we respect that.”
This is a tough one. It’s tough not because of some overpowering ethical nerve, but an emotional one. Artists certainly should have the right to determine distribution, but to allow this archaic emotional attachment to a format to get in the way of public access to the material is foolish. This is a statement many bands tried to make when Apple launched the music store — bands that realized quickly that they hadn’t the might to change the course of history through market protest. The beautiful part about this whole argument is that Radiohead, like ColdPlay and Pink Floyd, are lousy to listen to one track at a time. Fans know this, and I have to imagine would by the whole album on iTunes, even if the option existed to purchase one track at a time.And now, Radiohead’s refusal to be in the iTunes store has further cemented them in the category of emo-also-ran, along with the Beatles’ army of attorneys, and all the others who chained themselves to the old ways just before the bull dozer mowed them down. And I’m forced to say of their next release, “who cares?”