From the Salmon

It’s well past midnight in England, which means that any moment now, I could get an email with a download link to Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows.

I’ve been anxiously awaiting this album for more than a year, ever since we were treated to live versions of most of the new songs over two nights at Berkeley’s beautiful Greek Theatre. And I’ve been really anxiously awaiting this album for the last ten days, ever since the band quietly announced that they were releasing the new album for download.

It’s unusual enough that a band of Radiohead’s stature would release an album on their own and with so little fanfare or distribution. Even more unusual, when excited would-be purchasers opened their online shopping carts after deciding to pre-order the album, they were presented with a form field where the price should have been.

Clicking on the question mark next to the price field offered a bit of cryptic guidance.

And clicking on the next question mark drove the point home a bit more.

Could it be? Apparently, the band was leaving it up to the purchaser to choose their price ... even free!

It’s a fascinating move, to be sure, and one that has to be at least a little unsettling to the larger music labels.

How much would you pay for an album that you’d been excitedly anticipating for months? Even when given the option to get it for free?

More to the point, how much did I pay?

Believe it or not, I paid eighteen dollars.

I know, I know. I could have gotten it for free. So maybe I am Citizen Insane.

But here’s what I was thinking…

First of all, this is a band that I love, and I’ve been listening to a dozen or so different live versions of each of these songs for the last year. I wanted to reward the band for the amount I’ve already enjoyed this music. So the only way I was going to take the album for free was if I was going to buy the $80 discbox coming out in December. While I might be a fanboy, that was a bit steep.

My first thought was to pay what I would ordinarily pay in iTunes (if Radiohead allowed them to sell their albums) or the new Amazon MP3 Store: something around 9 or 10 dollars.

But then I remembered the bonus disc that was coming with the discbox. And there’s really no way I wasn’t going to find a way to download that whenever it inevitably leaked, what with the album not including gems like “Down is the New Up” and “Go Slowly” and “4 Minute Warning.” So I figured that this was my chance to also give the band what I would have been willing to pay for those tracks as well.

Plus there’s something to be said for rewarding a band for challenging the existing models of releasing music. And while I’d gladly pay for a product that I know I’m likely to love, I can see where this model would allow me to legitimately sample for free the music of a band that I wasn’t familiar with. I think that’s worth supporting with a little financial applause.

Still, I paid eighteen dollars for something that I could’ve gotten for free. I don’t know… I might be wrong.

But hey, I obviously also bought me something else: the right to be a little self-righteous. And that — as the commercial says — is priceless.