Word: radiohead
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That number would be huge in boom times, but at a moment when most records languish on the racks like Depression apples, it's titanic. It also represents the victory of a business model every bit as counterintuitive as Radiohead's. Most musicians still carefully dole out an album's worth of songs every few years to keep from saturating the market. Vibe magazine counted 77 new Lil Wayne tracks in 2007. Besides coughing out guest verses for seemingly anyone who asked, he sometimes recorded three songs in a night and gave them away on the Internet minutes later...
Thanks to the band's ubiquity and decency about rock stardom, Coldplay has nudged its way into a place alongside U2 and Radiohead in the holy trinity of bands that affluent adults consider good, good-hearted and worth breaking the bank to see in concert. But a small cult devoted to hating Coldplay has also arisen--which wouldn't be worth mentioning except that most of its members are music critics and their fury has a Lou Dobbs--on--immigration edge to it. To mark the release of 2005's X&Y, the New York Times' Jon Pareles declared, "Coldplay...
...past the obscenities, and the criticism amounts to this: lead singer Chris Martin is a cornball solipsist, the melodies all have the same mass-produced "character" as a Pottery Barn table, and Coldplay's albums sound like crib-safe versions of Radiohead--a band that, while commercially less successful, is infinitely more hip and worthy of adulation. Film critics have waged their own version of this argument with moviegoers about the relative merits of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, resulting, as you've no doubt heard, in the complete commercial failure of all Spielberg movies. But if scathing reviews haven...
...fourth album, Viva la Vida, out June 17, Martin has volunteered that his band isn't as good as Radiohead or U2 and that cultural dominance arrived before it was earned. The goal on Viva la Vida, he's said, was to "get better rather than bigger"--which explains the choice of Brian Eno as co-producer. Eno, 60, was a founding member of Roxy Music but gained his greatest fame as the composer of such endearingly odd ambient albums as Music for Airports and as the producer behind U2's sonic leap on its fourth album, The Unforgettable Fire...
...that the production and sale of music can be profitable. Many smaller bands give away music to promote their concerts and expand their fan base for future CD releases, for example. Larger bands have proven that more flexible business models can work for them as well–Radiohead, which released its most recent album online, “In Rainbows”, asking that fans pay whatever they choose for it. When the album came out on CD, it topped the UK charts. We do not know the details of how a new copyright regime could be structured...