In Rainbows

"It's just interesting to make people pause for even a few seconds and think about what music is worth now." - Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead, talking about the way their new album, In Rainbows has been distributed.

Choosing just how much you pay for a digital copy of In Rainbows has opened up a whole range of possibilities for mainstream bands to get their music out there and if the downloads topped 1.2 million mark, on the day of release - as pitchforkmedia are reporting. It might be a bloody good way of doing business, at least as far as the band in question are concerned. Will there be a wider impact for record labels? Well if this Idea takes off, you could feasibly get rid of the labels and let the people decide what they want to listen to, voting with there feet, or ears.

Do we even need record labels anymore? with the rise of the internet, social networking sites et al, On the face of it all it would seem that we don't anymore but if you delve only a tiny bit deeper than that you realise just how important the label can be for a band. A lot bands I know wouldn't even be able to record their music without some kind of financial input from their label. So how can you distribute something that you can't even record? You can't, and nearly every band in the world doesn't have the luxery of taking a real gamble like Radiohead have and rely on the smaller labels keeping them afloat.

In this time of myspace saturation the record label has a bigger role than ever to promote bands because despite it being easier 'to sell' a band due to the amount of new media, there seems to be a larger number of bands to compete against. Making it harder for the better bands to shine through.

Oh and incidently In Rainbows is superb. Stay in and download it, and work out how much this album is worth to you...