Month: October 2007

Picked up the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows, which went live today with a set-your-own price model.

The site takes forever to load (with multiple network drops), at least until you hit the secure check-out portion. I’m sure the site is getting slammed, since people can pay as little as they want to — for the record, I paid £2.50. My reasoning: An album on iTunes costs about 10 bucks US, and the artist usually only sees 10-20% of retail in royalties. I paid Radiohead $5.11 US (as of this morning’s exchange rate), which is 5x what they’d see on a low-end royalty deal (and more than double what they’d see on the high-end). I gladly paid this, because I know it went directly to the band.

So far, I’m liking what I hear. One thing I thought was odd, though — Radiohead tagged the MP3 files, but included no album art. So, for folks who want something, I did a quick screen-grab of the website, sized as an album cover, for you to add via iTunes:

From the Nine Inch Nails website:

“Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. 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.
Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008.
Exciting times, indeed.”

Another artist leaves the sinking RIAA ship, and goes Direct-To-Consumer. The Long Tail grows and grows…..

After spending most of last week feeling generally weak and run-down, as though I was fighting something off, I finally, officially, Came Down With Something ^TM late in the day Saturday. Felt like crap all day yesterday, and still don’t feel 100% today. Bleah.

⊕ Summat for the Geeks: A photocopy of a page from a 1988 issue of “The Grammarian”, the school paper of Paisley Grammar School, the alma mater of David Tennant (born David MacDonald). Alongside a picture of the young Mr. MacDonald, the profile speaks of his dream role — playing the Doctor. Check it out.

⊕ I read the first book in a new YA science-fantasy series last week. Philip Reeve (author of the non-YA Hungry City Chronicles, which I now must track down) has written a steampunk tale called Larklight: A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space, and it’s brilliant. Aetherships travelling the solar system, visits to Mars and the Jovian systems, Space Pirates, Giant Spiders, Automatons, and more. Reeve knows he’s writing for adults as well as kids — there are in-jokes aplenty (for example, the recounting of the colonization of Mars is a word-for-word rip of the opening of “War of the Worlds”, but with us invading them….and there’s a Martian serving girl named….wait for it…..ULLAH.) The second book in the series (Starcross: A Stirring Adventure of Spies, Time Travel and Curious Hats) has just been released in hardcover — I’ll be waiting for the paperback, but I’ll definitely pick it up.

⊕ Anybody thinking of doing NaNoWriMo this November? With the disintegration of my writing group (and the resultant lack of deadlines), I’ve been considering using it as an artificial deadline generator to get me off my ass and back on track. I read Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! over the weekend, and it had some interesting things to suggest about the NaNoWriMo experiment, notably that the “go-go-go” rush to complete 50K in 30 days has the benefit of turning off one’s Internal Editor — which is absolutely one of my worst problems. So, I’m thinking of giving it a shot. Not that I’ll be doing a 50K word “novel” — but that I’ll plan on producing 50K towards a longer work. I’ll most likely post word count progress during the month of November, but no details — maybe at the end of the month, I’ll share what I’ve got down with anybody else who participated as well. Any takers?