Look, I went to Coachella in March for the first time, and there were lots of brilliant performances, but when TV On The Radio came on, they totally drowned out the performer on the second stage. It was impossible to be heard over them. And don't even get me started about M.I.A. and her damn air horns. I'm sorry, but the main stage was colossal and when a band was rocking out with the volume cranked, it was loud and I mean loud. Way louder than 110 decibels, and it projected across the whole polo fields by six sets of speaker towers each over 80 feet tall. Music at the smaller stage? Simply drowned out.
Austin City Limits festival is different. Zilker Park in Austin is vast. Which is lucky, because there are three huge stages with capacity for at least 10-30 thousand people each, and four other stages with capacity for 3-5 thousand. For those three days, there are at least 60-80 thousand people in the park there at any given time. It's nuts. And yet, sound from any given act does not spill into the other stages for the most part, and that's the point, isn't it? A venue has to be large enough to support whatever number of stages a festival offers.
Luckily, Bird has a voice and he rocks this song:
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On another note, a managing editor for Reuters.com named Richard Baum (@rbaum), sent out a microblog on twitter saying:
Radiohead says no more albums. I guess the pay-what-you-like model didn't work http://bit.ly/jGjaKWhat the hell? Okay, first of all...
Radiohead - Harry Patch (in memory of)
Oh look, Radiohead just recorded a song in the studio and released it on their website for one single solitary British Pound. Yeah, it's not "pay-what-you-like". All proceeds will be going to the Royal British Legion, so the site says. Yeah, it's just one song. Yeah, it's probably a one-off because of the unique nature of the song.
But maybe Radiohead will begin releasing tracks whenever they have an idea that gels and they have time to all get together and put down on a track. Personally, I think that's a great idea. How many times in the past year have we heard about corporate music execs and lawyers getting all exec-y and lawyer-y about singles getting leaked onto the net before the studio album is released, or before radio stations receive copies of a single for airtime so they can hype the album prior to release. That's the old corporate music marketing machine drill, and it's been getting punked by online leaks and downloading.
Baum's conclusion is laughable in its wrongness. First of all, he assumes that just because a band is continuing its progressive behavior of shirking off old-world music distribution company habits by deciding they're through with recording whole albums at a time, they are giving up on the innovations they've made in the way they do business.
Obviously, Radiohead is not done making music.
Secondly, Radiohead made millions of dollars selling their last album for whatever people wanted to pay for it. It went "platinum" the first day it was released. The data on this is incontrovertible. Fans loved the way Radiohead handled the release of In Rainbows.
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Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have a few singles out there, but lately I've been hearing this one a lot, and that's good because I love it.
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Home.mp3
Well, hot and heavy, pumpkin pie,
Chocolate candy, Jesus Christ,
Ain't nothing please me more than you.
Awww. 4 hearts for making me smile a lot. ♥♥♥♥
I posted this yesterday, but it was actually today. So I renamed it.
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