TaranT wrote:David Byrne (ex-Talking Heads) interviews Thom Yorke (Radiohead) re: the "experiment" and the music biz in general.
Byrne: What about bands that are just getting started?
Yorke: Well, first and foremost, you don't sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero. That would be the first priority. If you're an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment. Then again, I don't see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway.
Byrne wrote a really good article generally on Wired recently as well...
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/musi ... tPage=all#
As for Yorke and this Radiohead experiment, I'm actually getting slightly negative - not because it's a bad thing, but because discussion of alternative music distribution has gotten too focused on this model as some sort of holy grail.
As my father, a professional musician who himself distributes largely online has pointed out, that response by Yorke actually does dick to address the real problem for "new artists" or small artists. The assumption that an artist who doesn't have the pop value of Radiohead can survive in their niche using Radiohead's distribution model is pretty ridiculous. Being off a major label doesn't solve the problem of distribution, in some ways it exacerbates it.
The fact is that Radiohead can afford to risk not making much money on sales of the album. Because there will always be huge demand for them to perform live, and they can always make it up if they fail on one or other project. Smaller musicians don't have that luxury and that friendly a market.
The experiment is a success for promoting Radiohead and probably for general strategies for first-tier artists. But I'm starting to think it may actually hurt smaller, more niche artists in the long run if it continues to be the focus of the whole alternative distribution discussion.