No Name Blog

Yesterday the band Radiohead have anounced that their new album, In Rainbows, will be available for downloading from their site and you decide what you pay. That is right you read that correctly you pay what you think is fair. I am a Radiohead fan so after reading this I started thinking what was a fair amount to pay for the album. At first I thought that ten dollars would be fair since that is what I would pay if I downloaded it from iTunes. Then I started thinking what is Apples’ cut on that $10, or even the record companies percentage. So I searched the Internet with Google to find what artists receive in royalties for CDs. I found this site: here. I’ll use the highest figure of 9.1 cent per song downloaded. There is 10 songs on In Rainbows so Radiohead would get $0.91 from iTunes if I were to download it from there. I think that this is too low, even for a cheap bastard like myself. Radiohead has to pay for the servers and bandwidth for these uploads, so let’s say that I give them what Apple get for every song downloaded, 29 cents. Two dollars and 90 cents plus the 91 cents in royalties gives us $3.81 to download In Rainbows. I think it is a fair price and I think it will be in mp3 format (we just don’t know) and early next year they will release a CD version of it and I will have to own a physical copy of it and I’ll dish out another 14 dollars for it then, unless it is crap which I doubt it will be.

All of this has made me think that if they only offered the song through iTunes I would not feel guilty from downloading it from a peer to peer site. Why you may ask, well for us that us a GNU/Linux operating system (I use Ubuntu and Kubuntu) iTunes does not work on our fine OSs, so the only way for us to get it is either we reformat our computers to Windows, or we use an unenlightened friends that still uses Windows and download it on their computer or we download it from a torrent tracker/limewire/emule. I think the latest stats are that GNU/Linux users number less than 2% of all computers so they are willing to lose our business.

Let’s move on to another subject; I’ll continue my short review of television premieres, here are my latest ones. My Name Is Earl staring Jason Lee is still very funny. Some of you may not like this humour but lots of us do. Las Vegas is very pretty to look at with all the beautiful people but damn the show is stupid. They take themselves way too seriously. Numb3rs is always the same. They are trying to show us that nerds are cool too, maybe they should have hired a nerd to write it, it would be better and cooler. American dad not bad but not as good or entertaining as The Family Guy, don’t get me wrong it’s good but not excellent.

Some of you might wonder why I keep watching shows like CSI (all of them), The Unit & Las Vegas and the like even thought I consider them sub par. It’s because at one point I enjoyed these shows and I am hoping that I might enjoy them again. Another reason is because there is potential and I wish that they reach that potential. Some shows are guilty pleasures, like Survivor or Big Brother. Maybe at one point I’ll loose interest and drop them like I decided to do with Prison Break.

Well that is it for now. I still have a few more shows to watch so I’ll post my short reviews in upcoming posts. See you then.