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…And quite sooner than I expected I must say. Since the beginning of this blog I’ve been complaining about my experience with the distribution of music and I was hoping that sooner or later artists would come to realize that the best way of getting their music was over the internet and giving it away for free. What I didn’t expected was that everybody needed a role model.

As everybody knows now, Radiohead released earlier this month “In Rainbows“, and they decided to quit on record labels for good by giving away the album through their website. As I see this, with a traditional release, the album would appear on every P2P network out here about a month earlier, fans would had payed anything for the CD, and the band would had received a rather small share of these sales. Instead, they gave a choice, so that people that were going to download it anyway for free could still do this. And as for the fans, they could pay whatever they thought the album is worth.

But this wasn’t easy. I think Radiohead planned this very well because they managed to “distract” everyone by giving false hopes that the album was going to be released until 2008. And why? I believe this was a way to calm down all those “early released CD hunters” so that the band could give away the record and have total control over the downloads. They announced the whole project just 1 week before the release date, and this gave very little time for everybody to look around and pull some strings. And I think it worked. They managed to keep the record on the dark until a few hours before when some sources revealed links to download it.

So, as I said, it seems that everybody needed a role model, a kind of “example” or simply inspiration to take the next step. Trent Reznor posted that they were going “free agent, free of any recording contract with any label” just a few days later than Radiohead, although, this is a battle that Reznor has been fighting for a long time, and I’ve been admiring him the past few years for this, since NIN is a band that has been under recording contracts for over 18 years as the original post says.

This week I read that rumor has it, In Rainbows had over 1.2 million downloads. The donation average was between £1 and £4 (mainly £4), so this means that maybe, Radiohead’s initiative does seem to have some future (and some nice new sound processors and toys for the boys).

Pointing the obvious, now everybody thinks it’s a nice idea, but its not a new one though. There are many services out there that provide their catalogue under a “pay-what-you-want” business model like Songslide, or the ones (slightly different) I posted here.

The thing that excites me the most, is that now I can do this too, and not be catalogued as “weird” or “poor” (in an artist-like sense). As for the past few years, artists that explored this new business models were basically unknown and ignored by “common internet users”, but now, people will realize that they can find great quality music, and they’ll recognize this as it should be. Now, they know the drill.