EightyOne

Following in the footsteps of Radiohead’s ‘Pay as you please’ scheme for In Rainbows, two other major artists have released new, free-to-download albums.

Manchester indie veterans The Charlatans have made their new album, You Cross My Path, free to download through radio station XFM’s website. This is prior to a CD release in May, and would appear to be a move to support their UK tour in the same month. Fans are also being offered the chance to buy a Deluxe CD and ticket bundle.

Also free to download is the first part of Nine Inch Nails‘ experimental, instrumental album, Ghosts I – IV. This obviously serves to sell the 36-track work in its entirety, which is available in several formats. These work in a tiered way, which gives an option for people with varying degrees of interest in the work.

• Free, 9-track download of Ghosts I
• $5, 36-track download of Ghosts I – IV
• $10, 2 CD, Digipak with 16-page booklet. This is released in April, but comes with an immediate download à la Radiohead.
• $75, 2 CD, 1 DVD with audio in multi-track format for remixing, 1 Blu-Ray with high-definition audio, in a fabric hardcover slip case
• $300, ‘Ultra-deluxe limited edition package’ (the site doesn’t specifically mention what’s in this)

The Charlatans approach is going to be quite common, with bands releasing free music to encourage people along to their gigs. To the contrary, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is looking to promote sales of his new album with a ‘try before you buy’ approach.

Also of note is the tiered release strategy. Those with a little interest in Nine Inch Nails or Ghosts I – IV can sample the free downloads. Those who would have already given some consideration to a purchase (or perhaps grabbing it via BitTorrent) will probably feel that $5 for the download is easily worth it. $10 is a bargain price for those who like their music on a physical format, while the $75 and even $300 packages (the latter of which has sold out!) will really appeal to die-hard fans and those with an eye for something special.

These are two artists with different musical styles and different approaches to the changing music market. The both have the same agenda, though — to bypass record labels and get their music out to their loyal fans, and hopefully win over some new ones, too.

If you’re a web developer, there’s only one issue this week that deserved your attention: Browser version targeting.

On Monday, A List Apart published an article — Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 — that described a new, Microsoft-led method, of instructing browsers to use a particular version of its rendering engine to render a web page — in other words, which set of prior bugs or incorrect/missing parts of particular specifications a page needs to appear as originally intended. Version targeting uses a meta-tag in the head of a web page to specify what particular version of a browser the page was written to work with.

Questions about the motive or necessity for version targeting aside, one side-issue that has stirred up a lot of attention is the default behaviour of Internet Explorer 8, which will implement the proposed targeting. If the version targeting meta-tag is absent, IE8 will not use the most recent, standards compliant code to render your page, but will instead fall back to rendering as IE7!

To convince IE8 to render your nice, clean (X)HTML and CSS using its most standards-compliant engine, you need to add this meta-tag to your pages, which, I agree, sounds completely backwards.

The reasoning for this behaviour is that it is Standards-savvy developers that will know to implement the meta-tag, while legacy content that goes unmaintained will still render as originally intended. However, I’m not convinced that the proposed default behaviour will actually solve anything.

Surely, most of the problems that Microsoft are trying to address with this proposal are incorrectly coded sites, created for IE6 and earlier. Falling back to IE7’s rendering would only benefit those who have developed their sites using IE7’s ‘Standards’ mode, or at least updated it to render correctly in IE7.

IE7 was a big leap forward for Web Standards, as it was the first new release of Internet Explorer for around 5 years, and supported parts of the CSS 2.1 specification that had been missing or incorrect in Internet Explorer 6. However, this leap forward came at a cost for developers not adhering to Web Standards, as sites that looked correct in IE6 now looked broken in the more standards-compliant IE7.

If IE7 is the default choice for rendering sites that do not feature the meta-tag, then websites developed for earlier versions of Internet Explorer will still reveal their problems under ‘No meta-tag, IE7 mode’, anyway. Meanwhile, while IE7 does still have its issues, I believe that tightening up the Standards-support is hardly going to have catastrophic effects for any sites that were developed for IE7’s ‘Standards’ mode.

It’s also worth mentioning that sites that rendered in IE7’s ‘Quirks’ mode (that is, using IE5.5’s rendering engine) should be unaffected, as they will still be rendered in ‘Quirks’ mode in IE8.

I haven’t seen this particular point raised anywhere in the various blogs commenting on the proposal, or the associated comments left, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some detail that I have missed that may invalidate my point. However, the more I think about and read up on version targeting, the less I like the idea.

Not only have we finished the new demo, but I’ve also managed to get the new site up and running in time for its launch!

I took a different approach to my previous attempts, and came up with a design first before converting that to a Wordpress theme rather than trying to build a design as a theme. It’s a little minimal at the moment, but the plan is to work in some odd details and do some tweaking as and when I feel inspired to! I’m not exactly a ‘that’ll do’ sort of person, but the most important thing was to get something I was happy with together, and go for perfection after the launch. :)

The design is a fixed-width, single column layout, with a horizontal navigation at the very top of the page and a large banner for the demo underneath. I removed the banner for anything but the home page, although this leaves the other pages looking a bit sparse, which is something I’ll have to work on. Also, I plan on implementing some archives sorted by month and category.

I’m also trying out Google Checkout for selling copies of the CD online (£1 + P&P!). As the service didn’t launch that long ago, Google are waiving the fees (which are still cheaper than PayPal) for the rest of 2007, which is quite nice. It makes it very easy to set up a ‘Buy it now’ button — this simply links through to Google Checkout to handle the rest, which is all we need since we’re only selling a single item. We’re also giving the CDs away to people who come along to our gigs — it’ll be interesting to see what the demand is, both at gigs and through the website.

And I thought Amazon’s approach to online music distribution was radical!

It appears that Radiohead are making the most of being out-of-contract with Parlophone (EMI) by letting fans decide what they want to pay for their new album.

In Rainbows is out on the 10th of October, and is available for download at a buyer-defined price, or in a ‘print-on-demand’ box-set with the album on CD and 12″ vinyl, an extra enhanced CD, photographs and artwork, at a cost of £40.

It’s a very interesting approach to selling your new album. It’s not like Radiohead are an obscure band, and I doubt they’re short a few quid, but the slightly pricey box-set will be a must-buy for die-hard Radiohead fans and collectors, while the (potentially) cheap download version will help promote the band. I also expect that quite a few purchasers of the download version will go on to buy the box set.

From Boing Boing: Radiohead lets fans pick price for new album:

“[...] the box set (Glorious thick 12″ vinyl! and “enhanced CD”) is $80, but the downloads are name-your-own-price.”

“This is major, and it’s such a slap in the record industry’s face. An unsigned superband, treating loyal fans and customers like loyal fans and customers instead of thieves — what a revolutionary concept.”

Amazon recently launched their online music store, named amazonmp3. Unlike most other online music stores, though, Amazon’s offering is completely DRM free, and for this reason, the launch of the amazonmp3 store is a hugely significant event for the online music market.

There is already another large player in the DRM-free market — eMusic offer a completely DRM-free catalogue of independent music and is currently the second largest seller of online music behind iTunes — but amazonmp3 has some significant advantages. Needless to say, the Amazon name clearly already has a lot of trust in online sales, whereas eMusic is still relatively obscure, at least outside the US.

Amazon’s key advantage is that it is able to offer a completely DRM-free catalogue that also features music from two of the four major labels. It is also offering music on a per track/album basis rather than the subscription model used by eMusic — a far more attractive proposition for most people, I expect — but also at a lower cost than the iTunes Music Store. It is really taking the best bits of the two market leaders and undercutting them while it is at it.

I will almost certainly be using the service if/when it launches in the UK. The big draw for me is that it will work perfectly with the system I already use for portable music. The downloader used by the service will integrate almost seamlessly with iTunes on the Mac. Yes, on the Mac! As an iPod user, I rely on iTunes to sync music and manage podcasts for me (and I’m perfectly happy with this arrangement). Any tracks I download from Amazon will be automatically imported in to my iTunes library and subsequently sync’ed to my iPod. Nice.

Compare that with music from most other online music services, such as the now defunct Virgin Digital — their tracks wouldn’t even play on my iPod because of the Windows Media DRM, and that simple fact rules them out of something like 90% of the MP3 player market. Does that make any business sense?

Seeing such a big player as Amazon launching a DRM-free service with major-label support is a huge step towards creating the sort of marketplace that most online music consumers want, rather than a market that alienates customers, locks them in to services and technology, potentially encourages piracy as a less complicated route to obtaining music, and therefore seriously limits its potential to grow.

Instead, it will allow interoperability between computer platforms and portable devices, and give us the sort of market that consumers wanted all along — something more like the CD market, where you can purchase music on a medium that will play on any technically capable device without any added complications (rootkits and the like aside!). Hopefully the remaining two major labels will recognise and acknowledge the advantages of this approach and get onboard soon.