Noteworthy Notes of Which to Take Note

Wired.com has a great article/discussion between Radiohead's Thom Yorke and David Byrne. If you have been reading my blog of late, you know that I was pretty amazed by Radiohead's move to offer their newest release, "In Rainbows" for download at whatever price people were willing to pay. The CD doesn't even come out until the 1st of January! Thom and David discuss this a bit, but also the creative process, the involvement of the audience in the music, and the bizarre state of the industry nowadays. Clearly we are in a transition period that is enabled by the easy access to technology. Revolutionary.

The most interesting thing I found was that Byrne says he makes most of his income from licensing his music to films and TV shows. WHAT?!?

There was also this fascinating blog entry predicting that iTunes would add lossless downloads to its store within a year. I think it will happen eventually, but I give it 3 years at least. Maybe this is my own self-interest talking, because FLAC album downloads are one of the main advantages of BitWorks Music over the mainstream download shops. Really we are a few steps beyond that even, offering complete multimedia albums with full liner notes, video, photos, wrapped in a fancy web browsable package. My favorite thing with the new albums is the hidden "Easter egg" included with every album, but you aren't supposed to know about that, because it's a secret see. Doh!

On the other hand, another friend of mine said that "nobody cares about FLAC except for the geeks." Is that true? You tell me. Nobody can hear the difference between MP3 and FLAC, or so they say. One friend of mine has an actual listening room with about a bazillion dollars of audio equipment. For those who have made an investment in decent audio equipment, lossless downloads are the only way forward.