Radiohead – almost right

I’m over the moon many different ways about the new Radiohead album. You’d have to have been living on the moon to miss the story, but just in case you have, it can be summarised like this: You buy and download the album direct from Radiohead’s web site, and name your own price. That can even be £0 if you like.

My copy cost £5.55, which seems pretty cheap for an album to me. The best part, however, is that exactly £5.55 goes to Radiohead, with no stinking record labels or pointless middlemen in between. (For the sticklers amongst you, I actually paid £6.00, with £0.45 being the credit card processing fee). I don’t know how much they would have received if the album had been released in the usual way, but I would guess around about a pound. I know we used to see, at best, about £1.50 from the sale of a £30 game.

I’m certainly not complaining about the album itself, but that was very unlikely to happen given that I love everything Radiohead do. The true test of that will be Mia though, who although also a big fan is too young at two years old to be as set in her ways as me. What am I moaning about then, with the “almost right”?

Hoops.

I had to jump through hoops, starting with navigating the bizzare web site, enabling javascript for two different domains, and finishing up with filling in my address, email address and even ‘my’ (hah) mobile number. It’s little wonder that despite that fact you can ‘buy it for free’, there are reports of substantial downloads via other channels. Frankly, there are very few bands I would have put up with that amount of messing about for, and I doubt I will do it again, so I would make the following suggestions for anyone (and let’s hope it’s everyone) following in Radiohead’s footsteps:

• Make the download available directly, with no messing about. You don’t need my email address or mobile number. If I want to give you them though, let me do that seperately.
• Get web developers with a clue. Nothing about navigating from page to page or filling in a form means you need to run Javascript on my machine.
• Make it easy to pay, either before the download or after. I might feel guilty about my measly £5.55 this time next month and want to cough up some more, but I’m not keen on going through all that again. Make it easy – consider PayPal, consider a bank account I can just transfer into.
• Bear in mind that I can undoubtedly download it quicker from somewhere else (e.g. a torrent) than I can from you. Maybe I can just copy the files from a friend. If I’ve done one of those things, I still want to pay you, so just let me do that. At the same time, you save the money on the bandwidth.

Other than the above, which are really minor quibbles, this is surely the way all music will be bought in future. Everybody’s happy except the middlemen who’ve been so determinedly destroying the music ‘industry’ for so long.

Oh, and a sidenote for Amazon because I’m still annoyed by this – by some accounts over a million people have managed to buy this album so far, without needing to install some software and agree to a draconian and offensive software license agreement.