in-rainbows
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WoW Moviewatch: Bathing with ghosts
(Warning: This video contains some harsh language.)If you thought you were having a bad day, you haven't met this guy. Apparently every time he takes a bath, he sees dead people! We applaud him for repeat attempts to bathe ...Paus, from #machinima on Quakenet IRC, supposedly put secrets in each scene of this machinima. The story audio comes from the beginning of a Radiohead song, All I Need, from their In Rainbows album. How many hints can you find?[Via Warcraftmovies.com]If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.Previously on Moviewatch ...
Antiquated hardware used to masterfully remix Radiohead's Nude
It takes some serious game to rise above the legions of mediocre DIYers out there and stand tall as a true legend. Judging by the video posted up after the cut, James Houston can now consider himself one of the elite. Somehow, this cat managed to tackle the nearly impossible task of remixing Radiohead's Nude without defacing it entirely (read: merging bits and pieces of the tune into a 4/4 arrangement and calling it a day). Instead, he utilized a host of aging hardware (Sinclar ZX Spectrum, Epson LX-81 dot matrix printer, HP Scanjet 3c, etc.) to create a rendition that even Yorke could admire. For fans of In Rainbows and mesmerizing music videos alike, there's a must-see waiting just below.[Via Hack-A-Day, thanks Eliot]
Radiohead on iTunes? Yup
As many of you (judging by the number of e-mail tips we have received) know, the latest Radiohead album, "In Rainbows" is now available on iTunes. The album is $9.99 in the US and released via iTunes Plus, meaning the files are DRM free. This is the first Radiohead album to appear on iTunes (though fans will note that frontman, Thom Yorke's solo album, "The Eraser," has been on iTunes since its debut in 2006), where Radiohead has remained one of an ever-shrinking group of high profile artists not to list their catalog with the digital service.Previously, "In Rainbows" was available as a free or "pay what you want" download directly from the band. While the success of this promotion has been debated, it was always clearly devised as a promotion nonetheless. Shortly before launching the "In Rainbows" download promotion/experiment, Radiohead announced that the record, at that time, would not be released via iTunes. So what has changed? Well, the biggest change is that Radiohead is no longer with EMI. Digital sales have long been a point of contention between the band and their former label (and it is a primary reason the back catalog is not on iTunes and will probably not be on iTunes in the foreseeable future), now that the band has control over its own music and licensing terms (and is releasing the album via independent labels online and in retail stores), iTunes has become a viable distribution method.To make it even more clear: Radiohead decided to split from their large record label, in order to build-up hype for the album's official charting release, they did the free/pay-what-you-want online promotion. Now that the album has been officially released (so that it can be tracked by SoundScan and other technologies), it is being made available through both online and retail outlets. Edit: Clearly this is conjecture on my part, based on information released by the band and the music press. For instance, the album is also available at Amazon.com's DRM-free MP3 store for $7.99 US. Amazon also carries the majority of the EMI back-catalog (excluding "Kid A," for reasons unclear to me), which I assume is the result of differing contracts between the two digital services.Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
Fortune: Radiohead was dumb to ditch iTunes, make more money
As long as we're in 2007 review mode, let's review the saga of Radiohead's In Rainbows album (which is definitely one of my favorite albums of the year, by the way). First, they said no to iTunes to keep their album in one-piece, then they decided to "sell" it for free on their website (asking their fans to donate what they thought it was worth), and then they cleaned up.Then Fortune calls their decision the 58th dumbest of the year. Yes, the geniuses at Fortune believe that Radiohead screwed up, because they say that 68% of people who picked up the album paid nothing, and the rest of the listeners paid an average of six bucks. But of course, Fortune has got it backwards-- Radiohead, as we noted earlier in the year, would only have earned $1 per album going through the record companies, and so they were still able to rake in twice as much at their average of $2.26 per album download.Dumb? For the record companies, maybe-- they made exactly nothing off of Radiohead's new album. But when you consider what the band made, this distribution method makes even iTunes look dated.[Via Gruber]
