Radiohead album is 160kbps MP3 - another little DRM corner cut away

"In Rainbows", Radiohead's new album (OK, so you weren't waiting, but stay with us) is now available - at a price you, the buyer, set - for download in 160kbps MP3 format (thanks, Tim Anderson). We've also (separately) come across an attack by Ian Rogers, who works for Yahoo Music, on the music business and in particular its love of DRM:

He's no newcomer: he was there with Winamp before Napster. And then watched the business's reaction:

Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn't invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.

(Wasn't that Galileo? Anyway, let's move on.) Eight years after that, Amazon - with its MP3 download store (though only in the US so far) has "finally done what was the right solution in 1999".

He sums it up somewhere in the middle of a Stephen Fry-esque length post:

Inconvenient experiences don't have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you've lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.

It's DRM which makes life inconvenient (see the photo of his from Flickr).

I'm here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I'm not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I'll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won't let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life's too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

In short, he's mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more.

My own experience: in 2000, I met some people from American music publishing companies - that is, the people who get paid when a copy of music is sold. (Slightly different from the record labels, who package the whole.) The Napster lawsuits were brewing: I asked them if they agreed. Not at all, they said: because Napster had a central system, you could see what music was being traded - which meant, in theory, you could simply record each trade as a piece of publishing, and ask Napster for some money per trade. If Napster had moved to a subscription model (which would have been quite feasible) then it could have made a ton of money for itself and the publishers alike. And the record labels too, perhaps.

As it is, DRM is being eaten away from the edges - as are the record labels. Nine Inch Nails has no record label, and Trent Reznor, its driving force, says

as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.

And of course the Charlatans are giving their album away for free some time next year. Perhaps pop won't eat itself; it'll just serve itself up for dinner. Though quite what that means for the Simon Cowells and Sharon Osbournes of this world isn't clear - though I suspect Cowell makes more money from the X-Factor live shows than from selling the records. (Prove me wrong, someone.)

But: is the Radiohead album actually any *good*? As I write, it's already on at least one bittorrent site... Oh, hang on, that's answered over here. Interesting comment: "trouble is, I'm now listening on decent headphones and the bitrate is showing. the compressed drums on 'Reckoner' sound muddy, and it lacks 'width' just when it needs it, when the strings and vocal harmonies rise and swamp the mix. it's also ruining a lot of the bass." That'll be yer MP3 compression there.