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I just received an email update from the people behind Radiohead’s new album release, saying that they’ll be sending me my authorization code for downloading their new album. That’s right, 160kbps, and DRM-free. If you haven’t heard, Radiohead had finished their contract with EMI and have gone independent (whatever that means nowadays). With their upcoming album, In Rainbows, they’ve been offering it for download for whatever price you want to name!! What in the name of lunacy has possessed them to do such a thing????

If you’re still on 8-tracks, let me help enlighten you. Converting music into a digital format has made it easier to duplicate music and to distribute it with a click of a the mouse. In our digital age, music has become a commodity and some even say our generationbelieves music is free. This sudden shift in consumer thinking and demand has left the music industry reeling as CD sales have plummeted while music downloads are estimated to have gone from nil in 2003 to 53 million in 2006.

Interestingly enough, Radiohead’s publicist has said that initial totals from their pre-sales have shown that they are making close to what a typical album would regularly make. Seeing that they’re Radiohead and they’ve got a massive fan base, it would be hard to generalize that this case will work for everyone. With a large percentage of their listeners as being in the 25-40 age group, it also makes online distribution that much easier. But what we’ll see overall are shifts in the traditional music label’s modus operandi, in that they’ll need to learn to embrace digital to continue to thrive.

I’m not a big Radiohead fan (at least not yet from what my friends are telling me), but hey, for a couple of bucks I can download it and get a legal copy that I can share with my friends, I think that’s awesome. But if they’re able to make this money on this first album, then great! However, music listeners today have a concept of value in mind when they’re purchasing, instilled by years of CD sales. But in the future, when the next gen of listeners no longer go to store to buy albums, how much will they decide the value of an album to be?

Just in, Oasis, Jamiroquai, and Nine Inch Nails has followed Radiohead’s lead and have dumped their label in what is becoming an interesting trend on how bands are communicating with their fans.

Tags: Music, Tech by Administrator
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Last week, various newspapers reported about Apple and EMI’s introduction of DRM-free music onto iTunes. From this site：

DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today — 128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM — at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.

For me, I want my music as high quality as possible. I must’ve been spoiled by my dad’s obession with HiFi systems, because I’m usually annoyed at any song file that sounds remotely low-fi’ed, leaving me to suffer at the hands of those who don’t know how to encode their songs from CDs. The only low-fi music that I can normally take is at a KTV bar, where music quality takes a lesser role behind the performer of the moment.

For others, I’m not quite sure this is the case. I don’t think the majority of listeners are actually bothered as much as I am, so the selling point for for them is….that’s right, feel free to pass it around! This is a business shift that EMI has taken, lowering the boundaries of music access to getting music available to more people out there. Nowadays, the “CD” revenue share has shrunk to become only one of several revenue streams for musicians and artists, and if taken as a single revenue source, makes it very difficult for an artist to survive. For EMI, making their artists more accessible hopefully transfers to more revenue. Only time will tell!

Tags: Music, Tech by Administrator
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Hope you all had a Merry Christmas, and I apologize if I didn’t get back to you earlier with a reply. If you weren’t aware of of the earthquake that took place off southern Taiwan just yesterday of a magnituude of 7.1 and 7.0 on the Richter scale, you probably wouldn’t have been aware of the impact it’s had on us poor people here in China. You might be wondering how does the earthquake in Taiwan affect your internet connection in Shanghai? Well, supposedly the earthquake has had a severely deterimental effect on the internet cables in the ocean.

So this morning, I woke my computer from sleep but wasn’t able to get to any sites. I originally figured that it was a broadband issue (as it almost usually is). When I got to work I realized that it wasn’t just my connection at home but EVERYONE had this problem. Then my friend and I deducted that the load times of web pages only affected international sites and local sites didn’t have a problem. You know the feeling you get when you want to find any recent news or if anyone else on the internet has had the same problem, but you can’t access it? It’s like giving me a guitar pick with no guitar…

But fortunately I was able to squeeze some information from some RSS feeds and from word of mouth about the earthquake affecting it. So my question is to why I was able to access the internet at normal speeds last night at midnight, since the earthquake was earlier in the evening? And if they’re to repair the lines, what do they have to do to fix them? If they’re broken do they have to re-lay the lines into the bottom of the Pacific? I mean, how in the world do you do something like that? And how long is that supposed to take? It’s not like I can snorkel under the water surface with a soldering iron or some duct tape and fix a tear in the line? Welcome any thoughts…

Oh yes, if you’re reading this from within the country, you can probably access this news article faster..

Tags: China, Shanghai, Tech, Website by Administrator
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