you do mean the same radiohead that just signed with a label right?

what I like about this model is that the kids can get it for free since they don't have means of paying online anyway. (assuming they can atleast blag their parents for the minimal 49p on there c card) whilst adults can pay a few quid for the album, and the riaa can suck my fat wan.

While I'm not trying to justify what the record companies do, they do add some value to the mix. They do promote (some more than others) the artists works and second, they also gather (and pass on a very small portion to the artists) the royalties when the music is played in a public forum, such as radio, sound track to a movie, etc.

The RIAA takes $2 from each CD sold.
The MUSICIAN gets only $1. 
The record company gets the rest. 

This is ridiculous!!! The bands don't even care as much as the industry does. 

I agree with one of the commenters above, we need to take this into our own hands and sell DIRECTLY to consumers. 

I only use http://www.musicneutral.com to support musicians. No way I'm giving a cut of my cash to the industry. 

It's important that we all come together to show that we have had ENOUGH!!!!

how inflexible the record companies are. They keep beating the same dead RIAA horse as their only tactic. They are just sticking to their sinking ship and refusing to adapt even in order to survive.

I suppose they are unable to adapt because all the parasites in the record company boardrooms have got so fat and lazy after years of leeching off the sweat of others that they haven't got a clue about original thought, or how to create anything themselves that has actual intrinsic value.

I'm actually pleased about this, as it means that they will just all go away quicker.

...but you need a market for everything. Imagine a street with a Radiohead CD store, a Rolling Stones CD store, and a James Blunt CD store. You have to visit three different stores to buy all of the CDs you want. Same goes for web sites, you need a cental market for these things. I have a feeling all of the lazy bums out there will just go pull it off the torrents, as that will become the new, convenient, one-stop-shop and the artist will again be starving. Then the record labels will rise from the ashes...sorry for the doom and gloom.

From the corporate standpoint, this must seem like the worst kind of communism. To me, it's capitalism at its most basic. 

It harks us back to the day, (Saturday, ackshirley), when we went down to the market and bought our veggies right from the grower at whatever best price the two of you could haggle out...no middle man/woman/weasel, no overhead except the metaphorical, (and in the case of the veggies, actual), stall, from which the transactions were, well, transacted.

Will it catch on...? I hope so. Will it last...? I hope so again. 


The RIAA is capitalism at its most basic. If you dont have a product - they dont any more - then own someone elses.
Its a complete antithesis of the free market.
These sort of companies will die, they may create a huge amount of collateral damage but they will die. Its the consumer and producer that will suffer untile they do.

At a certain point in history, the record industries had a reason to be, exploited this reason and flourished. Nowadays, records no longer matter; those folks should have shifted business before some dramatic change took place. Sorry for those greedy bastids: business has changed, they could not cope, their days are counted. Sure, they will fight... but in the end, even the unsinkable Titanic.... sunk!

Sell directly to the consumer!

I find it hard to believe that something like this is going to flop in the long run, if for no other reason than that which is simple and functional is always more appealing to the consumer than that which is neither.

This also has the added benefit of, barring any existing contracts, being something the RIAA cannot stop via the courts.

If the RIAA have an ounce of evil in them they will try to discourage everyone from this model. Its their death sentence. I would not be surprised if they try and stamp all over this dream.

It's never been about illegal downloads. It's always been about killing the electronic download completely. It's always been about controlling the market from the cartel's middleman position.

If the artist can sell direct to the customer, they can charge a quarter of the price to the consumer, and still make ten times as much as going through the record cartels, all while keeping ownership of their own intellectual property. Benefit for the customer and benefit for the artist

If the artist and the customer deals directly over the internet, that leaves the media cartels nowhere and with nothing. They've been circumvented, and that's the one thing they've always been afraid of, and is the thing that is a dead certainty.

The cartels' function is to rake in the profit by screwing over the artist with a loansharking agreement, while controlling distribution and advertising at the other end. That's a business model that is coming to an end, and the people to benefit the most from it's download will be those that make music, and those that buy it - not those that package up "product" and are only interested in "shipping units", all the while screwing over the artist and the customer at each end of the spectrum.



I would love to see a record label pay the Artist to have the privilege to sell the music on a CD in the store. It's about time that the artists get the empowerment that they've deserved for so long.