Everything in its Right Place

For the record, I paid $6 (after taxes) and after hearing the first seven songs, I like it. But that’s not important.



What’s important, or at least what’s really cool about today’s release of Radiohead’s latest album In Rainbows, is the resurrection of the dead concept of the Record Release Event. Remember when record stores used to open at midnight and people would line up to get the latest from Guns n’ Roses, U2 or Nirvana? Aside from a single or two on the radio, no one had heard it yet and everyone heard it for the first time all at once. No one does that anymore. You can, I know M-Theory records in San Diego has midnight release parties (with pizza!), but most people download it off iTunes, buy it from Russian sites for half the price, steal it, or have their friend Sharon who works for an A&E newspaper in Boston send them a copy of the promotional discs. OK, maybe that last one is just me, but the fact remains: everyone gets the new album on their own time in their own way.

By releasing In Rainbows over the Internet as soon as it was done, at the reasonable price of $Whatever You Want to Pay, Radiohead insured everybody, and I mean everybody, got the record at the same time. No magazines or Web sites got it early for review purposes. Nobody leaked it. Due to the fact that the earth revolves around the sun while rotating on its axis, people in the UK got it Wednesday morning while those of us in California got it shortly before midnight Tuesday, but in it was all the same moment. And I think that’s pretty cool.

Of course I’m a grandma and a nerd, so I have a skewed view of cool.