RADIOHEAD: Amnesiac

Kendall Bentz responds to the original piece, 7.06.01                                 email jb now

JB:

Read your essay. Good work. Although, I don't think you're touching on a "small point." What you've touched upon, and this you know, is how dramatically the music business has changed since the Beatles and the Clash. Radiohead most likely had absolutely no say in when their album was released — the record company (with whom they no doubt have locked in a multi-album contract dictating what they do and when they do it) tells the distributors when this stuff goes out.

It would be interesting to consider something more than just the disappointment of Radiohead being controlled by the record industry. Yes, it is disppointing to see talented musicians caught in the same game as everybody else. . . but, is there an argument to be made for the music industry going back to the genius of the Beatles marketing machine, or the Clash? The fact that the Beatles released all their work, cleaned off the desk and moved on to the next project, was not just fellow-musician's cred. . . it no doubt helped their marketing of their music. Perhaps I go too far, but if the dot-commers revolutionized anything, it was how they revolutionized branding—the idiots gave away anything and everything so you would remember Pets.com (sock puppets), Amazon.com (coffee travel mugs), Kozmo.com (hats, bags, etc, etc.). Could it be that giving away sooo much material all at once was driven both by musical integrity AND by the urge to flood the dj booth with as much new material as possible? It has, perhaps, a similar effect as mentioned in the examples above—it gets people's attention, it generates buzz for the "brand/band," if the "brand/band" is hot it will give DJs a heckuva lot of material to sort through and keep in rotation. . .etc.

The problem for the dot-coms was they had no viable business to back it up. The problem for the music industry is the lack of viable bands to back up the marketing. That wasn't a problem for the Beatles, the Clash, nor should it be for Radiohead (it seems to me). Maybe the execs should take a tip from the past and get the music out there—not just for the masses, but for the moolah.

— KB





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