Usable Interfaces

If Radiohead’s intention in letting customers choose the price they pay for the band’s new album, In Rainbows, was to light up the blogosphere, then it’s certainly worked: here, here, here and of course, right here.

They were actually beaten to the punch by the Charlatans, who’re not messing around with making customers pay 1p for their content - the next single and album from them will be totally free.

Good, blunt quote from Charlatans manager Alan McGee, “I thought: well nobody buys CDs anyway….[so] I came to the conclusion – ‘why don’t we just give it away for nothing’”.

The funniest write up is Andrew Orlowski’s opinion piece:

Labelless, but hardly penniless, Radiohead are letting their fans set the price for digital downloads of the band’s new CD.

… The new release will also be available in physical form – £40 for a box-set – easily affordable to the well-heeled bourgeois bedwetters who make up the band’s core following.

Then again, this is such a guilt-ridden corpus of record-buyers they may well feel obliged to make more than the minimum donation.”

He also makes the obvious point this sort of thing might be OK for Radiohead, Prince and the Charlatans, but where does it leave the bands at the bottom of label’s rosters, the ones that aren’t millionaires with tens of thousand of rabid fans? Top bands will likely come out with more than the 10% of sales the labels would have given them anyway but the younger groups need more support. 

Possible captions

• “Radiohead delighted with record sales”.
• “Which of you fuckers put our album on the internet for 1p, I needed to buy a new sweater”.
• “Lads, the good news is that we sold a 100 copies. The bad news is everyone paid 1p”

Interesting to find out (although I always knew deep down) that black is the new black (according to Jon Leach).

Several people also seem to be pointing out that old is the new new in advertising - both in terms of the before and after of mass media which Amelia and Steve (and Seth Godin) have been talking about, and tonight a fantastic set of speeches and discussions around the Account Planning Group’s book launch of the collected articles of Stephen King (the inventor of planning, who died in 2006).

All of the speakers kept coming back to the observation that many of King’s declarations from as far back as the 60s or 70s have a frightening similarity to the sorts of the things we are saying today, even down to the language including phrases such as ‘the changing nature of consumer attention means we must examine their relationship with the brand’. Indeed the book itself is subtitled ‘the timeless works of Stephen King’.

One thing really stuck in my mind. One of the panelists at the discussion at the end of the evening said that in the paper she was critiquing for the book (each paper has a summary by a modern day practitioner), Stephen King talks about the appropriateness of the title ’account planner’.

It turns out the term was coined in a meeting on the basis that it was a cross between ‘account handler’ and ‘media planner’. King, apparently preferred the term ‘brand planner’ and had even suggested ’brand designer’ as an alternative. Now there’s something that couldn’t be more relevant today.

(Sample of King’s work before the book comes out later this year).