my new music drought is over

I downloaded my first free album just now, Radiohead's In Rainbows, and I'm listening to it as I type this post.

I've been a Radiohead fan since Pablo Honey dropped in 1993 and I've dutifully purchased every other album since, even defending my purchase of OK Computer to friends who thought the band had gone off the deep end.

So, getting In Rainbows, an entire album from one of my all-time favorite artists, for the price I chose to pay ($0.00) marks a seminal moment in my life. Yes, I could have paid the typical $9.99 for the album, as I've been conditioned to do so by my iTunes (and, now, Amazon) experience. Somehow, I didn't feel compelled to do so, as Radiohead's given me the chance to name my price, and my price at this time, in this format, is "free." When the physical CD is released later this year, I fully intend to purchase it then. But I won't pay for the music twice. Nor will I wait. Maybe I'm just hoping other bands follow suit and give folks a chance to sample the entire album, guilt-free, before spending money to buy the damn thing.

This is a big deal for me, as I've always eschewed the music stealing sites like Napster and Kazaa, and have only ever downloaded music I'd actually paid for or was authorized to download for free by the artist/distributer (at iTunes or direct from an artists' site). I appreciate the 30-second samples available at the music sites, but there's nothing compares to listening to an album straight through to know if you're dealing with a single solid tune, or an album of hidden gems that'll never make it to the charts, but you'll know by heart within the week.

Listening to music has always been a big part of my life, and I think a lot of this comes from having grown up in a small town (Los Alamos, NM. population: 15,000) where listening to the same album over and over and over provided some sense of escape from the day-to-day monotony that is the small-town way.

The radio was a gateway to another world, and I remember my first personal turntable: not the "good stereo" that was in the living room, but a turntable of my own to keep in my room to play whatever I wanted to play on it. I bought my 45s and LPs at the local record shop which meant my collection was limited to whatever was on the charts in the early 1980s.

My tastes, thankfully, swung from Heavy Metal (the official state genre in the 1980s) to New Wave/Punk around ninth grade thanks to a crush I had. When I discovered my crush's taste in music, my collection grew from Pink Floyd and the Scorpions and Def Leppard to include Depeche Mode and The Smiths and Black Flag as I got to know her better.

These were the years of the first Sony Walkman personal cassette players, and I'd go through cases of double-A batteries powering my trips through my own worlds of tones and lyrics and beats and moods created by artists who seemed to somehow know exactly what I was going through as a teen growing up in a small town. I was a member of Columbia House for years, spending my allowance on cassette tapes that each had the tell-tale double-pink stripe on the spine to indicate it was a Columbia House product. I still have most of the cassettes in a box downstairs in the garage, even though I don't even own a cassette player anymore (that's a topic to be explored in a future post, though).

And so I collected cassettes. Lots of them. And I created mix tapes with favorites songs, first by hooking two cassette decks together, then using the same dual-cassette deck once that technology became affordable. Yes, I was that kid in high school who constantly made and distributed mix tapes in quest of the perfect mix.

And when I started driving a car, I think enjoyed the ability to crank the stereo as much as I did to get from point A to point B while listening to the cranked stereo.

Then my parents got me a CD player as a high school graduation gift (my first CD was Suzane Vega's Solitude Standing) and a whole new realm opened up for me. Gone were the days of playing a song then waiting while rewinding to replay the song, always guessing where the beginning of the song actually was, and wearing out the tape in the process. Now, at the click of a button, you could fast forward, start over or shuffle!

And so the next decade of my life was spent acquiring CDs, both through the mail (BMG this time) as well as at the funky record stores around college in San Diego County and then at places like Amoeba Music and Rasputin Records up in the Bay Area.

I had CD players everywhere I could get them (portable CD walkmen, CD/cassette player in the car, CD players around the apartment) and was listening to music just about non-stop. Mix tapes were much easier to make, and the quality of sound was much better. And I could dub multiple copies to give to friends so they'd be inspired to go buy the same CDs I had. I never once thought my mix tapes were taking money away from the artists, because all I ever saw was my friends going out to buy the albums of the artists I'd exposed them to via my mixes.

Then the digital music scene hit, and, while I was an early adopter of computers an online life, I never got into the song-swapping scene. I was too busy ripping my own CDs onto my PC in a format that could be read by my first-generation iPod (remember Rhapsody in those days before Windows-based iTunes?). I'd collected over 800 CDs, so it took a lot of time to rip, and I wasn't about to just give away all this music I'd spent so much time and money accumulating as my own to someone who was just acquiring for the sake of acquiring.

So, I never got caught up in the Napster scene, and after a while, it became a point of pride that I'd never swapped music that way. Sure, I'd still trade (and rip) CDs with friends, but that was on a one-to-one, in-the-flesh basis. But I haven't ever participated in large-scale anonymous music-swapping. Call me old fashioned, by I think this large-scale swapping is theft. And while I think the RIAA is going about the problem (suing folks) the wrong way, I do think these swappers are getting what's due.

So yes, I think the RIAA and the labels have completely blown the opportunity to embrace mass digital distribution as a way to revolutionize the industry and change up their business model. And they'll continue to fail, which will leave room for innovation and experimentation by the artists themselves. Innovations like Radiohead's pay-what-you-like to download the album before the physical CD drops (hell, even before they line up a label to distribute the physical CDs). Wilco and others have shown the free-to-download-digital, pay-for-physical-item model works. Why wouldn't it work this time with extra revenues coming from those who choose to pay twice (for whatever reason motivates them)?

So, legally downloading In Rainbows for free feels good to me. It feels right.

And it's a kickass album to boot. I can't wait to by the CD.