This is, perhaps, an odd post from someone who hopes one day to earn money from the music industry. However various recent things have got me thinking;
Firstly, Prince (and now Ray Davies) opted to release his new album via a national newspaper. This seriously annoyed all the traditional retail outlets who, all of a sudden, decided that they needed to stock the said paper. Then electro-rockers (Gosh! That sounds bad, but I can’t think of a better classification) Radiohead announced that there new album would be available as a download at no fixed cost. As they put it “it’s up to you.”
I don’t, in principle, have a problem with either of these. If it costs £100k to make an album and a newspaper offers to buy it outright for £250k in order to distribute it to 1.5 million readers you’re £150k up! That’s probably a good deal for all. I firmly believe that the internet is part of the music industries future so Radiohead’s move doesn’t really surprise me. What has, along with many people, is the choice of format and bit rate. The MP3 format has been around for a while now and in that time hasn’t really improved any so choosing MP3 has seemed a little odd.
It works kinda like this the AAC format (introduced by Apple) is more efficient than the older (but “standard” MP3. A 128kb/s AAC file is equivalent to a 160kb/s MP3 file. In the interests of fairness I believe that Microsoft’s WMA file is similarly efficient. Radiohead’s decision to opt for the MP3 format at 160kb/s means that a lot of people loose out on quality. Personally I use the AAC format at 256kb/s so it’s no comparison for me. The band were further criticized for announcing this after people had ordered. I chose to pay nothing for the album, not because I’m mean but for big releases (such as this) I’d rather have a physical product complete with art work.
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