More to life than music downloads for Radiohead
Radiohead’s great album experiment appears to be over. When the band made its album In Rainbows available for download at a price to be decided by the buyer, many were quick to say that it was a revolution in the music industry. Music downloads were said to be the future. But even Radiohead are human after all, as their seventh studio album appeared on iTunes for a more conventional form of music download this week.
For £7.99, fans can now buy the album that last year they could get for free — legally. Radiohead are one of the few bands who have never let their music be available on iTunes. It looks like the whole world has gone mad for music downloads.
Radiohead have still not revealed any figures for their own music-download experiment, although Thom Yorke did say that 15 fans paid the maximum £99.99 for the album. Thom Yorke himself, however, admitted downloading In Rainbows for free — for his mum.
Perhaps even more controversial, this week saw the release of In Rainbows on plain old CD. The album is set to top the UK album charts with about 50,000 copies of the LP sold so far. The whole situation is bizarre and goes some way to proving that people still want CDs and not just music downloads – no matter how popular free music downloads become.
True music fans still buy CDs. Could it be — shock horror — that music downloads and CD sales can co-exist after all? Someone call the RIAA!
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