media Well done, and well put

Meg Marco of Consumerist.com sums up this weekend’s biggest popular-music story thusly:

Radiohead announced pre-sales for their record-label-free new album. The twist? You pay what you want. We predict that they will make a hilarious amount of money.

I agree. Hilarious is an excellent word for it. Take me, for example. I don’t want to be a douchebag and pay one penny for this record, though I could. For years I’ve been hearing about how Radiohead is the best band ever, but I’ve never made the effort to get into them, kind of fearing they’ll be less like Foo Fighters and more like Coldplay, and I need more of the former and less of the latter, and new music frightens me. New free music is a complete crapshoot; for every Jodi Winterton or Jim Vick.Combo you find on Indy.tv (they’re apparently rebranding themselves now, but they were a Great Thing), there are a hundred mediocre bands to wade through. Letting me download your album, legally, as DRM-free MP3s, for a price of my choosing, and standing out from the crowd in the first place, is exactly how you get me to listen to your band. I’m thinking … six bucks?

This is what the order form looks like.

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This is a fascinating tidbit from the registration form. Note that asterisks indicate required fields.
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