i paid £7, plus their £0.45 fee, so £7.45. i figure that's around what i'd pay for it if i had to get it at the local record store.

if you don't know what i'm talking about: radiohead has released their newest album, in rainbows, as a digital download (to be followed up with a deluxe box version). this is in itself big news, as critics collectively dubbed radiohead "the greatest band in the world" a few years back. but the really revolutionary part is that radiohead is letting you choose how much you pay for the album. don't have much money? go ahead and enter £1.00. or try plugging in £0.00 if you can bring yourself to do such a thing without feeling guilty.

this is basically an enormous middle finger to the recording industry. the band has no label, and yet will probably make more money from this release than it ever could have under any label contract. (plus they plan to do a normal cd release by january and will surely make more then.)

i kind of wanted to get the deluxe boxed set, but for £40 i just don't have the money to justify it right now. in fact, i had been waiting to even download it until i got my next long-awaited paycheck. (the check was from an august invoice, but apparently a "glitch" resulted in it not being sent out until the end of september, when it was promptly lost in the mail.) but then i remembered that i still had a balance on my paypal account, so i transferred that money over to checking, thus feeling justified to spend £7 for a digital download. (perhaps listening to amnesiac earlier today was too much and put me over the edge.)

the files are normal 160kbit mp3s, unencumbered by DRM. the download was quite zippy. and the music is pretty good, too.¶