11 Oct 2007 by Chris     No Comments    Posted under: Entertainment

Radiohead In Rainbows. In 1997.

OK, so I was intrigued by the fact that Radiohead decided to distribute their new album online and via a “pay what you want to” method. Not only was I intrigued, I was also very supportive of the idea. So although not a massive fan, I thought I’d buy it.

Downside number one: where do you get the new Radiohead album from? Every news story I read said it was available from the Radiohead web site. Sloppy journalism. It’s not. It’s available from its own site. No problem with that, except try as I might, I couldn’t find a link from the official site to the one with the album. In the end, I found the link on some fan blog. What were they thinking of?

Then came the download. Lovely “store”, I have to say. Easy payment, easy download once you’ve done so. But hang on… a 48.8Mb zip file? I didn’t expect AIFF or even Apple Lossless Format, but what on earth is the quality going to be like? Once the download had completed (I suppose on the plus side, the uber-compression meant this was about 5 seconds after it began), I could inspect the files. And the news wasn’t good. 160kb/sec bit rate MP3. That’s right, 160kbps. What is this, 1997? So In Rainbows now sits proudly (ahem) in my iTunes library as by far the worst-quality 10 tracks out of the 8,613 there. If they’d told me that before I paid for the thing, I’d still have paid, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as much. I doubt they’d have been able to get away with putting such poor quality on a conventional CD without at least labelling the case with a warning. It’s a shame they feel they can do it with a download.

And where’s the blinkin’ In Rainbows cover art then? Again, no warning about the absence of that. Unsurprisingly, people have begun to make their own.

Music’s good though.

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