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Showing posts from September 30, 2007

A Bold Master Stroke

The Rock and/or Roll band Radiohead has just announced (as of two days ago--so I'm a little behind the times) that they will be selling their next album online, for no fixed price. A prospective consumer has the option of paying anywhere from 99.99 GBP to, well, 00.00 GBP. I'm no economist, but it doesn't take Milton Friedman to tell you that a contract with Generic Big Record Company, Inc., is a bad deal for just about any music making organization: all the revenue from units sold gets chewed up by dozens of middle-person companies. I don't remember the exact figure, but a band makes pennies of royalty on every dollar's worth of sold CD. This is one reason bands like Metallica were so anti-file-sharing: despite being a huge, world-famous rock band, they need every income stream they can get, and get very sensitive when said income streams seem threatened. I've always thought that the internets, rather than being the net-negative bands like Metallica (and t