Power to the people (well .. kinda)

Ok so the title of this post is a bit crappy, but who cares. Good things happening for music. Bands going Direct to Fans, Death to DRM.. ahhh .. nice.

That's what Radiohead is doing with their new Album - in Rainbows, going direct to the fans. The album releases today and you can download it from here. Ofcourse, you can order the discbox too from the same place.

Yeah there are some consumers bitching about the quality. 160 KBPS apparently is not good enough!!! (yeah, even I was rolling my eyes, Some people eh) click here to read the whinin on Gizmodo.

In my opinion, Pay what you want for downloads, is great.

Then we have Nine Inch Nails doing the same thing. Dumping records labels and agents and going direct to the fans/consumers. Here is part of the text from the official site:

I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.

(Click here for the whole thing)

How can I forget, a great presentation from Ian Rodgers (VP n GM of Yahoo Music)

here is part of it:

Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.

I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life's too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

(You can read the whole stuff by clicking here.)

That chucks out DRM .. YES!