The Best Album You Never Bought 4.29.08: Steal This Column

Posted by Dan Yates on 04.29.2008

This week, we take the title of the column far too literally and look at Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and how a "one-hit wonder" got a head start in a tortoise and hare race (Or is it a David and Goliath battle?) for online supremacy.

This column is brought to you during that time in between Mario Kart sessions and real life. So, please, forgive me if this falls into the short, but hopefully oh-so-sweet category. File this one under "unedited, stream-of-conscious ranting."

I have another confession to make.

I am a pirate.

I compulsively download music. All the time. Have for years. But so do you, so nothing is at all shocking or interesting about that revelation. You and I, stranger, despite whatever differences no doubt exist in our character, share that one unifying bond. We are a part of that generation that grew up and collectively decided to destroy the music industry. Or so we are told.

And as a generation, we should be proud.

Unlike the punks before us or the hippies before them, we've made an impact. Someone actually heard us. People — important people — have noticed and, more importantly, they've reacted to us. Those on both spectrums of the music industry — corporate bigwigs and artists themselves — have seen the Internet affect their bottom line and have embarked on projects trying jump ahead of the curve, being the first to discover a way to make this new distribution method work for them.

For the bigwigs, it's selling music online. After the unprecedented success of Napster, Kazaa, Grokster, Limewire, and about a million other person-to-person applications, not to forget the be all to end all of portals to free music, BitTorrent, record companies launched an almost equal number of online pay-for music services. All of which were, and are, doomed to fail. The iTunes store is excluded in this, because it's cooler somehow.

Artists, however, are taking a different approach. After, "the Metallica way" of bitching and moaning proved to be a failure, we have been witnesses to a movement of artists and musicians catering exactly to what we like. They've been giving us free music. Although what they are serving is an all you can eat buffet coupled with some heavy-handed moral questions.


/'s and _'s speak to us Internet folk.

In very recent memory, there are at least two examples where high-profile bands have taken to the Internet with full-length albums of brand-spanking new music. Radiohead did it last fall with In Rainbows and, only a few weeks ago, Nine Inch Nails started handing out Ghosts I–IV on its website. Both bands gave you options with the download. Radiohead let you pay what you wanted for the album, asking, "what is music worth to you?" Nine Inch Nails meanwhile offered a free version of their album and a variety of other versions at costs between $5 and $300.

Upon throwing In Rainbows onto the ol' information superhighway, Radiohead was heralded for being the biggest act to date to jump on the online bandwagon. The New York Times called it "most audacious experiment in years." That's some high praise and, in a way, they're right. Radiohead might be ahead in the war against leaked albums and online downloading, but while the band is winning the race now, it was beaten to the start line by another band that, at least at one time briefly, had a little weight behind it's name — Harvey Danger.

If you don't remember Harvey Danger, you probably weren't paying close enough to that flash in the pan in 1997. But that's not being fair. I like Harvey Danger in a broke-down REM college band kind of way. The band's debut album Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? is a kind of harmless, listenable and inoffensive release, that remains noteworthy, because it had that one song that Weird Al paid tribute to in one of his polka medleys. "Flagpole Sitta" earned the band some fame, some television exposure and some sweet soundtrack money. It was a quick and catchy song that caught the tail end of the alterna-everything craze and earned the band a spot in pop culture trivia history.


Harvey Danger is old time-y.

The late 1990s seemed like a prosperous time for the band, but record company issues plagued the release of the band's follow up album, which eventually went nowhere. The band disbanded in the early 2000s, setting them up for an eventual reunion, comeback album and a foray into Bit Torrent album releases. The band's album Little by Little … was released in September 15, 2005, in stores and online through Bit Torrent one week later. As an album it's good. It's obviously not In Rainbows, but it's worth listening to. Track it down. Download it.

Within in two months, Little by Little was, reportedly, downloaded over 100,000 times. That's not bad, but it doesn't compare to Radiohead's numbers, which have never been released. Estimates though indicate the band moved several hundreds of thousands of downloads on the day it became available. Proportionate to the two bands' varying fame and notoriety, the sales may be similar though. Perhaps the Internet isn't the great equalizer. Let's quickly explore the obvious.

If we are the group of downloading youth, both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails are a part of a number of aging, but not necessarily fading, alternative rock stars. As it has been widely reported, more and more of these bands, signed to big label record contracts in the early- to mid-1990s are coming to the ends of these contracts. Only, instead of seeking sweeter deals, these bands are now taking their brand name they've established by working in the music industry and are now going to into business for themselves in an effort to make their own industry. They're part mavericks and part pioneers, sure. But they're also entrepreneurs. In this race, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails had the benefit of starting in a privileged position.

At the end of its Internet experiment, was Harvey Danger better off? More people probably heard the band's music, but did they gain any ground? Make any more money? Radiohead probably did. It got a lot of attention and got a lot of people talking about their record. It may even have made them a few bucks.

If, on average, the band got $1 for every downloaded album (some people actually didn't put in $0.00 to get it), that's probably better than what they get from the record company for every album sold (I am guessing). But they were only able to do so, because they already had a significant and loyal following. Radiohead didn't reinvent the music industry. Radiohead reinvented Radiohead. This model can work, but it can only work for bands in Radiohead's situation. For Harvey Danger, and bands of smaller statures, this isn't a new way to seek new heights of fame and finances. It can earn you some attention and a small degree of fame and give you a start, but as South Park taught us a few weeks ago, for most people, it's all hypothetical success. There's no way to cash it in.

It appears that, for the time being, if you want to be a rock star, you'll have to do it the old fashioned way. And if I were a record executive, I would take comfort in that fact.