BUYING RADIOHEAD

To get this experiment off the ground, the first step was buying a Radiohead album.

Yes, I said 'buying'.

If I were writing this blog fifteen years ago, listening to recorded music without paying for it meant you were either listening to the radio or listening to a CD at your friend's house.

But is not fifteen years ago, it is modern-day today, and if I told my friends fifteen years ago about a blog they would have thought that I suffered some sort of head injury and that I had started making up my own words.

Discussing commerce and Radiohead reminded me of the following fact which I forgot to include in my list of Things I Know About Radiohead:

15. Radiohead made waves when they released their album "In Rainbows" for free. You could download it from their website and contribute any amount of money that you felt was appropriate, or you could just download it for free without paying a dime.

Needless to say, this attracted a lot of attention from those in the music industry. In the year 2010, the game has completely changed for record labels and musicians. What were once steadfast rules fifteen years ago today no longer apply.

I'm not going to get into the whole In Rainbows-download-for-free discussion here, I will probably do that a bit later on. For right now, let's focus on what it takes to buy Radiohead's first album, Pablo Honey.

I believe in paying for music. I'm not going to claim that I abstained from downloading; in the wild gold rush days of Napster's first incarnation as a take-all-that-you-can file sharing service, I was downloading everything I wanted along with everyone else. I can very easily justify this practice by explaining that much of what I downloaded was not available anywhere else; I would have paid for it had it been made available to me elsewhere. I downloaded a good number of Beck tracks that were either never commercially released or had only been released on obscure vinyl pressings and (mysteriously) more obscure CD compilations. I downloaded songs from bands I read about in Rolling Stone or bands that I had heard of, taking their songs for a little test drive without making a commitment to buy. Usually, I ended up buying that band's CD's and even seeing them in concert, so no harm done there.

I don't engage in any file sharing these days, not because I question the morality of free downloads, but more because I'm afraid of my computer getting an electronic version of syphilis.

I was considering the ways that I could listen to Pablo Honey, and it occurred to me that I could probably find a website that allowed the album to be streamed free of charge. If nothing else, I'm sure that someone made little 'tribute' videos for each of the songs on You Tube, so with a few clicks here and there I could listen to the album without opening up my wallet.

In the end, however, I decided to go about it the old fashioned way. Maybe I wanted to replicate the buying/listening experience of a teenager living in the year 1993, or maybe it's because as a child of the 90's I will forever and always have a love of the compact disc, or maybe I wanted to have a Radiohead CD collection, a physical item to keep as a memento of this little adventure. I don't know the reason why, but I do know that I decided to go with the plastic on this one.

The first place I looked was ebay. I've bought many used CD's on ebay, and it's a great place to buy them; many CD's sell for only one penny plus three dollars of shipping added (of course, it only takes about a dollar to ship the CD, so really it's a $2.01 CD with one dollar of shipping added to 'hide' the profit, but for a $3.01 total investment, it's still a great deal). Right away, I noticed that something was different about the Radiohead CD's for sale. Most other 90's band CD's for sale on ebay sell very cheaply, but there were only a few sellers willing to start the bidding on Pablo Honey below the one dollar mark. Many retailers offered the CD at $9.99, plus three dollars shipping; I figured that I'd rather just go buy it from Best Buy rather than buy it from a shady online retailer.

I went to the Best Buy website, and they offer Pablo Honey for $12.99. The next day, I found myself standing outside the Union Square Best Buy while running an errand with my girlfriend (shoe shopping!) so I ducked inside to pick up my copy of Pablo Honey.

Twelve dollars and ninety-nine cents is a decent price to pay for a CD. $9.99 is better, but I think that anything $13 or less is a good price.

Later that day, when my girlfriend and I were walking through the West Village, we stopped in a used record store to see if we could have bought Pablo for less money. First we checked the store's 'new' music shelf, and while I wasn't surprised to see that they had Pablo Honey (as well as every other Radiohead album) in stock, I was surprised to see the pricetag: $16.99.

That's a whole four dollars difference. I understand that Best Buy thrives on destroying little used record (er, CD) stores like this one, and if there had been a one or two dollars difference, I would have considered buying from the independent record store, but paying $16.99 for a CD seems silly. I haven't paid that much since before the day when Best Buy and Circuit City and Nobody Beats the Wiz all moved in to my local shopping mall when I was still a teenager, back when the only other options I had was buying CD's for $17 or $18 at Tower Records or Sam Goody. Best Buy, Circuit City, and the awesomely oddly named Nobody Beats the Wiz changed the game. The Moorestown, NJ Nobody Beats the Wiz store was the first to fall, then the entire Circuit City chain collapsed. Now Best Buy is the only giant left standing.

We checked the 'used' bin at the West Village record shop, and they had Pablo Honey for $8.99. I figured that at that price, I was better off paying an extra four bucks and buying it new.

But here's the weird part about buying Pablo Honey from Best Buy...

While I was sifting through the Radiohead CD's for sale (all neatly filed under R), I noticed that each Head album had a corresponding 'deluxe' edition with a second disc of music. The 'collector's' edition of Pablo Honey came with a second disc of live tracks and demo's. This version sold for $19.99.

"Hmmm..." I thought, "do I cough up an extra seven bucks to spring for the collector's edition?"

I decided that since I was not yet a fan of the band, it would be unwise to shell out additional dough for additional songs I wasn't yet sure I would like. Besides, I reasoned that it was silly enough actually buying a compact disc in this day and age to begin with; I'm sure that if I decided to obtain these tracks down the road, there are other ways I could go about procuring them.

Just now, I checked the price of Pablo Honey on itunes. The collector's edition is $19.99, same as Best Buy. But the version without bonus tracks? Only $6.99!

I'm going to make a point to REALLY enjoy looking at the CD insert so I don't feel ripped off.

Before I go, I just want to make one last point: who is out there buying the collector's edition? It's possible there are people out there like me, who feel the need to 'catch up' with this band they've been hearing about for seventeen years, people who are buying Radiohead for the first time. But it's more likely that the people buying these 'deluxe editions' are people who are hardcore Radiohead fans, people who are completists, i.e. they will buy anything and everything the band put out. This means that many of them are likely buying Pablo Honey, again.

I understand that any band that becomes as popular and universally loved as Radiohead (or, say U2, or The Beatles, or Bruce Springsteen) will have such a devout following, it seems foolish not to release yet another Greatest Hits album or box set. It's free money! A repackaged Elvis Costello hits package will always do well because the music is timeless and bound to be enjoyed by many generations to come. It also makes sense to repackage older bands' catalogs because the fans of that band are always buying newer and better sound equipment. Imagine the plight of the dedicated Pink Floyd fan; he buys Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl record in 1973, only to purchase the cassette tape of the same album in 1983 so he can listen to "Brain Damage" in his sweet new Oldsmobile Cutlass with optional cassette deck. He re-buys the album on compact disc in 1990, and again in 2005 in 5.1 Surround Sound. I totally get why that guy bought Dark Side of the Moon four times.

However, most Radiohead fans always purchased the band's albums on compact disc. Sure, a few probably went with the cassette in the beginning, but I haven't heard anyone complaining about having to re-purchase their cassette collection on CD; the advantages to CD were obvious. Obviously, improvements in sound quality were not the driving force behind the re-packaged CD in this case.

I also find it interesting that Radiohead, of all bands, is involved in this. Radiohead probably sits at the very top of the Street Cred mountain. They have always insisted that they make music the way that they want to; they avoid trends and fads, they detest the music industry promotion machine, they even gripe about their ecological footprint when they go on tour.

And yet, they sell CD's for almost double the price of the regular version just because they added a few live tracks and demo's?

Okay, okay, put the knife down! I understand that Thom and the rest of the band probably had nothing to do with this whatsoever. In fact, the deluxe/collector's editions were probably created in response to the band's 'we take our job seriously' attitudes. If the band wasn't going to put out new material at a pace deemed snappy enough for the Capitol big-wigs, then Capitol would put out new Radiohead material themselves. A few new, previously unreleased tracks, maybe a fresh dust-up on the mastering, and out the deluxe edition comes! I'm sure that almost every band signs contracts with their label that give the label the ability to repackage the band's recordings with or without the musician's consent. And hey, no one's begrudging the label or Radiohead the ability to make a few extra dollars.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I myself admit that I have re-bought CD's in a few instances. I bought the Japanese import version of Beck's Mutations just because it had two tracks on it that were otherwise unavailable in the US (even though the Japanese version cost $27.99 and I already had the 'standard' American version sitting at home), as well as Beck's 10th Anniversary Edition of Odelay, which had two previously unreleased tracks as well as a second disc containing rare and hard-to-find remixes and b-sides, even though I already had nearly all of the songs from my days using Napster.

Recently, I re-purchased Nirvana's Bleach, which included a recording of a 1989 concert.

I also bought the Beatles remastered albums, and those were worth every penny - in this instance, I can tell the difference, and it's striking.

So there you have it. This week, I'll be listening to Pablo Honey and then posting my thoughts here. At the end of the week, I'll be going back to Best Buy to pick up The Bends.