If I'd been reading Jim's blog more regularly, I'd have known about the release of the new Radiohead album a day before one of my students told me.
Still, what a cool idea: Pay what you will. I paid £4, and the download's available on the 10th. The discbox (an elaborate collection of material goods) ships in December.
Eric, who loves to pay for his music, asked me, "How did you decide that ₤4 was a fair price?" and my answer is:
It wasn't so much "fairness" that I used as a criteria. More like what I felt like paying. But my rationale was: I could get it free before long, but I think they deserve something for their work (though my £4 is but a drop in the bucket) and for their (potential) generosity (if no one were to pay) and for the sheer awesomeness of this idea (though I think someone, was it Neil Young?, has done a version of this before), which, perhaps, if rewarded will make the RIAA look like the asses that they are. On the other hand, if they sold their work on iTunes, the album would be $9.99 (a little more than £4); of course, Radiohead haven't (to use that weird British thing of thinking singular entities as plural--much like "couple" and "faculty") to this point worked with iTunes, and they may not ever, but iTunes has pretty much set the price point for digital versions of what some people call "property." Anyway, I figured £4 more or less directly to the band would be at least as much as the band would get from selling through a retailer, and it's a slight savings to me, so everybody wins. (Except the retailers.) BTW, there's like a 45 pence fee for the transaction (the "custom," those silly Brits call it--though said silliness happily enlightened me as to where our word "customer" comes from), so a retailer of sorts is clearly getting something.
Eric's love for purchasing really isn't a love of spending--more a love of consuming: "And, yes, I like the ritual of buying and opening albums. I suppose I enjoy that they are tactile. I like artwork. But it's ₤40, and that's steep, even in weird foreign monies. So I'll probably stick with just the download."
As for the tactility fetish, I can dig it. My only problem is the space that CDs take up. Since I've been moving around a couple of file boxes of gem cases for the last few years, I've pretty much decided to stop accumulating. (Not books, mind you.) Granted, my fetishization of spacelessness is a condition of forced mobility. Some day, life will settle down. And then I'll want that discbox. Which I can hopefully acquire for less than $90. But probably, at that point, more.
As for opening albums, well, I agree that can be cool--unless you don't quite get every bit of that fucking sticker on the top of the CD removed in one piece. Apparently no one's yet invented a chemical to remove that damn adhesive. (Though I did just get an email forward about the amazingness of WD-40, which I should maybe try on some of my CDs...)
