by SHANE SINNOTT

As of yesterday, Oct. 10, you can take part in what’s sure to be one of the more interesting Internet experiments in recent memory. Radiohead are releasing their new album In Rainbows for download, and the purchase price is pay-what-you-want. There will be a fancy boxed vinyl and CD set available later, but for now, the label-less, capital-B-Big band is offering a straight-up, DRM-free MP3 download, for a cost of your choosing (see here: www.inrainbows.com). I know what you’re thinking—yes, you can pay one cent (or one “pence”… Jesus, England, it’s 2007, enough with the Victorian currency), though when I tried to pay $0.00 it didn’t seem to work (putting me in—here we go again with the cutespeak—an endless “queue”). If you do decide to pay this little, it’s discouraging to think that you’re basically just going to pay a transaction fee to your bank or PayPal or whatever to download the album, which is presumably in deep violation of the band’s core

values. The question, of course, is going to be what the average purchase price turns out to be, which to be honest I’m curious as hell to find out. While it seems likely that this will go down as another of Radiohead’s quirky tricks, who knows, maybe we’ll all be citing it in five years as the beginning of a new way to release music. Surprisingly, the album hasn’t leaked yet, though here’s some live versions of songs it will contain: “All I Need” (tinyurl.com/yswdh6) and “House of Cards” (tinyurl.com/yob7d9).

And on the other side of the coin, the RIAA won their first big court case last week when a jury found a Minnesota woman named Jammie Thomas guilty on charges of sharing music online through the Kazaa application, and ordered her to pay over $200,000 in damages. Damn! While Thomas had what sounded like a shoddy defence, claiming that the account wasn’t hers, and sharing music you don’t own the copyright to is most certainly illegal, the punishment still seems way beyond what’s reasonable. It’s enough to send shivers down the spine of any online music sharer.