In a long-ranging interview with The Guardian, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon touched on the “whole machinery you have to build up” in order to sell an album these days, and why the whole idea of “The Radiohead Model” is at its core an art-devaluing myth:
“They did a marketing ploy by themselves and then got someone else to put it out. It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn’t catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don’t sell as many records as them. It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever. It was a good marketing ploy and I wish I’d thought of it! But we’re not in that position either. We might not have been able to put out a record for another couple of years if we’d done it ourselves: it’s a lot of work. And it takes away from the actual making music.”
Not that a level-headed comment by someone who actually makes music and who’s seen the machinations of the business over time will necessarily stop the ravings of the tech-obsessed types who think that Thom Yorke and Trent Reznor are representative of every working musician and the resources they have to work with, but I figured passing this along couldn’t hurt.
Art-punk band Sonic Youth talks to David Peschek [Guardian]
Earlier: Dear Journalists: Please Use This Definition Of “The Radiohead Model” Going Forward
On the other hand, this could be seen as the sort of opinion only someone with money could have. Art and commerce have always met at a crossroads, so why shouldn’t musicians dictate the terms?
@jt.ramsay: i dunno, i feel like “the radiohead model” is really an option only for people who have the capital to both make their art and market it (not to mention pay for bandwidth costs).
putting the “pay what you want” aspect of the Radiohead model aside, what was really revolutionary about the way they released the album is that they didn’t need to rely on the record company to promote it (and let’s be honest, a band like Sonic Youth is not exactly a major record label’s first priority in terms of marketing money these days). the record label wwould have set up some arbitrary official release date and then most likely the album would’ve leaked weeks or even months before anyone could purchase or pay ANYTHING for it (like most official releases tend to happen these dayes). instead they put it out immediately, right to the fans and created automatic buzz simply by making it a surprise. that’s what bands like Sonic Youth could benefit from. the fact of the matter is Sonic Youth is never going to make the kind of money that Radiohead does, no matter what the model is, but they could definitely avoid having to have the record company as some middle man between them and the fans who more often than not will fuck things up anyway.
@boxofboom: Wait, are you saying the record company will fuck things up or the fans will?
@Maura: I don’t disagree, but you must admit their bandwidth game is tight.
Unless one inhabits the Biggest Band In The World throne the way Radiohead did, somebody has got to promote it. I think it’s very unfair to assume that a person is both a talented and ambitious promoter as well as a talented and ambitious musician. It might not have been a record label doing the job, but somebody was doing the record label’s job for Radiohead.
@k-rex: DING! IAWTC.
It’s the promotion: that’s what RH doesn’t need, and what makes their “model” unreplicable.
Didn’t Robert Smith get neck deep in internet crap for saying something similar a couple of months ago?
As a musician can I just say I’ve felt for quite a while that Radiohead has done as much as Lars Ulrich in making musicians look like assholes for expecting people to actually buy their records. Halfwit, I remember when Robert Smith said it and I agreed then. I’m glad Kim Gordon is saying it, and I agree now.
On a side note: if you’re not aware of eMusic’s impending rate hike, the shitstorm surrounding that is also tied in with the whole idea of what is a fair price for music. Oh, there’s a lot more to it than that as well. eMusic really cocked up the announcement and tied it in with getting some Sony back catalog. Despite the fact that Drag City and Epitaph have left because of the low payments and that rumblings of other labels threatening to pull roots as well, the whole thing has become about greedy corporate labels and blah blah blah. I really can understand some of the outrage, but at the core I see a lot of people outraged at being asked to pay 40 cents a track instead of the 20-30 cents they are now and it’s kind of sad really.
Kim is brilliant. And she answered the question in a way that most people outside of the music business could possibly grasp.
This is far from brilliance, people. This hits me as if the band was complaining about Michael Jackson videos because they can’t dance. Very uncool.
What Radiohead head was, in theory, a relatively good idea at the time. Given the continual controversy over “digital music” and the never ending debate on piracy and regulation, it comes as no surprise that artists such as NIN and Radiohead are looking to their fans via their web presence to better control and regulate their music, granted where Radiohead went wrong was their “name your price” platform quickly evaporated into charges, set prices then limited access before being replaced with a lavish but outrageously priced discbox set. In Rainbows as a solid record and they had the right idea, but the whole thing seemed to go south rather quickly, so in that aspect, I can agree with Gordon’s criticism, though I feel eventually a means of music distribution in this sense may more or less be a step in the right direction.
David Byrne had a really good article in Blender sometime in the past year in which he addressed a spectrum of promotion/release models ranging essentially from “the musician is in complete control” to “the record company is in complete control.” I can’t possibly replicate his arguments, but he made a good case for the idea that all musicians should make decisions for themselves about which models fit them best, based on a whole factor of issues.