deWaard, Andrew. “It’s Up To You… No Really, It’s Up to You: Radiohead, Big Music, and the Future of the Record Industry.” The Business of Entertainment: Popular Music. Ed. Robert C. Sickels. Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2008. [full text pdf] [world cat] [publisher's website] [amazon]
Abstract: In October of 2007, Radiohead self-released their latest album, In Rainbows, bypassing the corporate record industry and its major label dominance, allowing fans to download the album in mp3 format for whatever price each consumer felt appropriate. When one logged on to InRainbows.com to download the album, instead of a price at the checkout basket, there was a box to fill-in with a question mark beside it. Clicking on the question mark prompted a message: “It’s Up To You.” Clicking again refreshed the screen: “No Really, It’s Up To You.” This choice included zero dollars, if one was so inclined. A highly publicized event, the press was quick to comment that this was the first major album whose price was determined by the consumer, but might it be the first major commodity whose price is determined by the consumer? This ‘pay-what-you-want’ experiment, then, was not just about the changing nature of a music industry in crisis, but of late capitalism itself, of our conceptions of commodity value, labour, and intellectual property in the digital age. If we accept Jacques Attali’s thesis that music is prophetic, and that every major social rupture has been preceded by a mutation in the codes, audition and economy of music, then what is our current system of music telling us about our future? By putting the onus of value on the consumer, Radiohead allowed the public to vote for an alternative vision of society by way of, increasingly and unfortunately, the only method available: the consumer dollar. The shifting terrain of popular culture and the entertainment market, especially the music industry and its forthcoming ‘celestial jukebox,’ is analyzed from the perspective of Radiohead’s symbolic act, with an eye toward the digital revolution’s role in music’s long history of social upheaval.
