Radiohead Are Naked!

Radiohead have released a new single: Nude.

They’ve split it up into “stems” and are asking people to remix it.

That sounds nice. Oh, but you have to pay for each stem (there’s 5: Bass, guitar, vocals, strings/FX and drums).

And “Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway will be registered and credited as the sole writers”?

Seriously, this is wrong on so many levels. Trent Reznor releases a 38track album under Creative Commons and encourages people to remix it. Radiohead release a 10 track collection of what feels like unfinished stuff they’ve had kicking around the studio for a few years (Nude for example has been doing the rounds on bootlegs for over a decade now), allow people to download it for as much as they want as a gimic to up their hand in contract negotiations before removing it for download and releasing it on CD…and now they have the gall to make us pay to give them content?

FUCK YOU RADIOHEAD! Seriously, this is the final straw. I endured a couple of mediocre albums, concert prices jumping for no apparent reason (the show is essentially the same as it was when I saw them in 1997 (twice), 2000, 2001 and 2006 but the ticket prices have gone up to over 4 times the price), but no more. Radiohead have got their last penny from me (and I’ve spent a lot on them over the years)

As a parting gift, I made them a remix: http://www.radioheadremix.com/remix/?id=165. It won’t be there very long, it violates section 7 of the terms and conditions, but it made me feel better. Maybe you can go and vote on it if you’re pissed off like me.

(Edit: Yup, its gone…Well, it had 53 votes before it was removed.)

7 thoughts on “Radiohead Are Naked!”

  1. Ups, quoting from the link:

    You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘AND ip = ‘*.*.*.*” at line 2

    Other remixes seem to work ok, so I guess you’ve been busted 😛

    (the *s there are to protect my IP number)

  2. I never quite figured out why people thought Radiohead were pushing the envelope with this shit. (I never really figured out why they continued to release material after the 90s either, mind.)

    – Chris

  3. Rui: Yeah, its gone. Oh well, it had 54 votes the last time I checked before it was deleted. Pretty good run really 🙂

    Chris: Well, the albums have been getting more self-indulgent since Kid A, self-indulgent in a “well, look what we can get away with” way. I think they’re very good at getting the PR required to make everyone think they’re the first, they’re not the first band to release an album online, this isn’t the first time they’ve given people the opportunity to remix stuff (at least I remember downloading a huge collection of wav files from their site before, don’t remember what it was for, think I still have them somewhere) and they’re certainly not the first to have this idea (first I saw was Mogwai in 2003(?) where they put a copy of Cubase and Hunted By a Freak’s individual tracks on the album).

    they may be the first to add money into the equation. So Radiohead have gone from being the band who toured the UK in a big tent so that they could play without corporate sponsorship to the band who team up with apple and itunes to get more money out of their fans.

  4. It’s Radiohead’s creative work, not yours. It’s so hypocritical to cheer them when they release direct to fans and then jeer them when they decide how to package and sell it. You shouldn’t draw a box around artists marked “This part is artistic freedom” and everything else has to be done the exact way some whining fan wants.

  5. skierpage: “It’s Radiohead’s creative work, not yours”…except its not. If I create a remix, then its both of our creative works. Radiohead’s T&C are taking what I’ve worked on and claiming it belongs to them. And then to make matters worse, I’m paying them to do this.

    The way a remix generally works is that Radiohead approach people and give them money to make a remix. This is the reverse of that.

    If they were doing this “for the music” then they would give it away, it is a brilliant marketing gimic to let your fans remix your song, but instead they’ve stuck a price on it. It is their music to do with as they wish, but when they become such blatent sell outs like this, then they lose me as a customer.

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