Radiohead’s Thom Yorke says the band won’t be repeating the band’s digital deal which allowed users to download a version of its most recent album for free.

“I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again,” he said, describing it as a “one-off response to a particular situation”.

That’s despite the gimmick paying off handsomely – both in promotional terms, and financially. Radiohead have done better out of this deal than many pundits suppose – and I’ll explain why in a moment. So why not do it again?

The short answer: the job’s done, and they don’t need to. Don’t be fooled by the guilt-ridden, right-on rhetoric: this is a group of canny businessmen with offshore bank accounts. And so they make hard-headed calculations, as canny businessmen should.

A crisis in the Strategy Boutique

Radiohead’s commercial goal was to recapture some of the huge worldwide audience that followed OK Computer a decade ago. It took almost four years to release new material. The back-to-back follows-ups, Kid A and Amnesiac, were self-consciously experimental.

In the meantime, Radiohead-influenced bands such as Muse and Arcade Fire had captured a slice of their former audience, the epic rock seekers. Competing with these arriviste pomp-rockers was risky, as the bumpy 2004 release Hail To The Thief made clear. So a more accessible direction was a natural course for Radiohead to take.

But back in Oxford, there was a big problem.

Radiohead had an upbeat title and the sunny, warmer graphics concept all set. The trouble was, there just wasn’t a lot in the creative larder: all the band had was a few familiar riffs and mannerisms. These were more appealing on the surface than the Warp-influenced albums of 2001, but there wasn’t very much you could hum. Or at least, you couldn’t hum it without sounding like a faulty air conditioning unit.

In addition, Radiohead’s refusal to deal with a strong outside personality – they’d been friends since school – ruled out the option of involving someone who could develop some of these odds and ends into another Karma Police – a Phil Spector type. So what they had, simply had to do.

Bring on the ‘tards

The band had an ace up its sleeve, however. That huge former fanbase still viewed the fading memory of Radiohead with affection, and they’d been patiently waiting for three years since the last new material (excluding solo stuff). This was enough to create an instant buzz – and the band bet that enough of these fans were so dedicated as to pay twice: once for the “preview”, and once for the physical release.

But it was the Music Freetards who catapulted Radiohead from the Culture pages in the papers into the Business Section, and even the front page. After a decade of digital music shenanigans, hacks were still asking the question, “What’s the new Business Model?” To which the anti-copyright crowd replied: “give stuff away for free!” For hacks who can look no further than bloggers for their ideas, this was the cue they needed.

(Here are some field recordings samples of Music Freetards captured in their natural habitat, and doing what they love doing best – bullying and whinging.)

Radiohead made a low-bitrate version available several weeks ahead of the physical release of In Rainbows. The management even waived the credit card charge – and you could get the album, in its entirety, for free.

Such was the buzz around Radiohead’s approach to market that few people noticed that it really wasn’t very inspired. No one seemed to mind very much. Contractually free of their deal with EMI, the band signed with Beggars Group indie label XL Recordings to release the physical version – which went on to top the charts in the UK and the USA. Many fans paid twice for the same recording – and some of these are fans who’ll complain about the music business’ practice of getting us to pay for the same record twice as one format supersedes another.

How the honesty box worked

Despite investing £20,000 in new servers to cope with the demand for the digital preview, Radiohead benefited from the “honesty box” release in several ways. There’s the one I’ve mentioned: the bet that people would pay twice – once for the preview, and again for the physical release.

There was an instant cash-flow dividend, too. There was no waiting around for a royalty statement from the Accounting Department of the Mega Label. And best of all, the renewed interest from overseas – particularly the United States – gave the band far higher royalties than they’d gain from a physical release with a major label.

So although fewer fans put less money into the honesty box than many people claimed, it didn’t really matter. Enough had done so to recoup the one-off costs – and the album was available as a sampler for weeks.

But one-offs, by definition, are not to be repeated. Neither Trent Reznor nor Coldplay have generated anything quite like the publicity that In Rainbows digital preview enjoyed.

Without the Freetards, the publicity coup could never have happened. Even the most inventive major label marketing genius with the biggest budget would have struggled to get such an indifferent “product” to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

And the real money, you’ll note, is in the CD, and getting fans to pay twice. Which looks a lot like the Old Business Model to me.

Nokia faces a crippling financial bill for its strategy of bundling free music with handsets, which will give users unlimited song downloads with Nokia phones.

The world’s biggest label, Universal Music, joined the “Comes With Music” initiative at launch last December, and Sony BMG joined last week. The Register has learned that Nokia must pay the wholesale per-unit rate for downloads over a certain ceiling – believed to be 35 songs per user per month.
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We have very little idea of how a hysteria can grip sensible, rational people – until it strikes. After Orson Welles’s War Of The Worlds radio broadcast, the public reported sightings of Martians. According to urban legend, a farmer’s water tower was peppered with small arms fire, in the belief that it was a Martian spaceship. During the McCarthyite Red Scare, the FBI’s snitch lines rang red hot with reports of suspected un-American activity. And in Hartlepool 200 years ago, the locals tried and hanged a monkey, suspecting it to be a Frenchman.

Here’s more evidence that the Net Neutrality scare is gripping otherwise rational people, presenting with two classic symptoms of mob-itis.

Professor Steven Bellovin of Columbia reported something strange with his Comcast router recently. Bellovin is a veteran crypto researcher with internet RFCs to his name – and not normally someone who needs attention. Last month he announceD:

“My cable modem service was out for eight hours yesterday. Tests I did – ICMP could get through to various destinations; TCP could not – make me believe that the problem is due to Comcast trying to treat p2p traffic differently.”

Of course. What else could it be?

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It looks like Al Gore is going to need every cent of the $300m war chest he’s amassed for climate persuasion. Americans polled by Gallup for ‘Earth Day’ value “traditional”, bottom-up environmental issues such as pollution and conservation as being more worrying than Global Warming. Remarkably, the level of concern about greenhouse gas emissions has barely wavered in a generation. Recklessness, or Huck Finn-style American common sense?

A third of Americans think “Global Warming” is a serious concern – a figure that’s effectively unchanged since 1990, when the question was first asked. Ominously for the climate doom-mongers, it ranks 10th on a list of 12 environmental issues. OK, so what are Americans worried about?

Water pollution issues are three of the top four areas of concern, with over 80 per cent of people registering serious concern. Waste contamination comes third, and the loss of natural habitat for wildlife fifth, with 77 per cent expressing concern. Then there’s rainforests (69 per cent), bio-diversity (68 per cent). Greenhouse emissions come in 10th – above urban sprawl and acid rain.

And when’s the last time you ever heard anyone mention acid rain?
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Music’s best-known “futurist” has admitted his latest business idea has flopped and the service will close. Gerd Leonard of “Music 2.0″ fame, who popularised the phrase “music flows like water”, has discovered that on the internet, revenue flows like set cement.

His company Sonific, which allows bloggers to embed a widget that plays music, will suspend its service on May 1. The founder blamed “lack of solid revenue modelling”

(Translation 2.0: no income).
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Sometimes Ofcom, Britain’s media and telecomms uber-regulator, likes to agonise in public whether Britain needs a media and telecomms uber-regulator.

It must feel like a stag night in SE1, as the executives fly in expensive blue-sky wonks and consultants, and Ofcom gets quite giddy with itself at the prospect of a world without Ofcom. Then sobriety returns, of course, and it wakes up and finds itself knickerless and handcuffed to a lampost.

So Ofcom gets back to what it loves doing best: Making Very Big Decisions about What’s Good for Us.

Yesterday Ofcom published its second Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) review in five years, and while this one extends itself to encompass new media – such as the very intarweb you’re reading now – it doesn’t do much more than hem and haw, and fret about the status quo. This PSB review doesn’t dare answer the questions it raises, while leaving the biggest issues untouched.

So here’s a modest proposal.
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Billy Bragg interviewed. With audio, it’s all here.

Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is embroiled in a legal fight against the recording business – and not for the first time. His MP3Tunes locker service has raised the ire of EMI in a case that continues this week. But isn’t it weird, he asks, how the Big Four divvy up the litigation against music start-ups between them so neatly?
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Bullying bloggers are no strangers to online media – especially when they’re Single Issue Fanatics (SIF). “They’re deeply emotional, they’re bullies, and they often don’t get out enough,” the BBC’s Adam Curtis noted here last year. This week, campaigner Jo Abbess is boasting about how she browbeat the BBC into modifying a story about Global Warming. The BBC has defended the changes to its story.

Abbess swung into action on Friday after the BBC’s Roger Harrabin reported comments by World Meteorological Organisation secretary general Michel Jarraud. In a story titled “Global temperatures ‘to decrease’”, Harrabin wrote:

“The World Meteorological Organisation’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Niña would continue into the summer. This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.”

La Niña is the cooling phase of what’s called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which affects the sea surface in the central and eastern Equatorial Pacific. Niña alternates with El Nino, which raises temperatures. We’re entering the Niña phase. Global temperatures have been static from their 1998 peak, when El Nino peaked.

It’s nicely illustrated by this graph:

Which also shows how foolish it is to extrapolate anything from short-term trends.

The plateau in temperature this century was acknowledged by IPCC chief Dr Rajendra Pachauri back in January.

Abbess fired off an email titled “Correction Demanded: ‘Global temperatures ‘to decrease’”. She argued that anyone who doubts the scientific orthodoxy is not qualified to hold an opinion.

“Several networks exist that question whether global warming has peaked, but they contain very few actual scientists, and the scientists that they do contain are not climate scientists so have no expertise in this area.”

Harrabin initially stood firm.

“No correction is needed. If the secy-gen of the WMO tells me that global temperatures will decrease, that’s what we will report”, replied the envy-corry of the beeby-weebie.

But our keyboard warrior fired back:

“Personally, I think it is highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics/skeptics who continually promote the idea that ‘global warming finished in 1998′, when that is so patently not true.

“Please do not do a disservice to your readership by leaving the door open to doubt about that.”

Harrabin began to wilt, promising to take on the doubters.

“We can’t ignore the fact that sceptics have jumped on the lack of increase since 1998. It is appearing reguarly now in general media. Best to tackle this – and explain it, which is what we have done.”

Abbess fired back again:

“When you are on the Tube in London, I expect that occasionally you glance a headline as sometime turns the page, and you thinkg [sic] ‘Really?’ or ‘Wow !’ You don’t read the whole article, you just get the headline.

“It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel.

[Even the BBC? - astonished ed]

They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth. I would ask : please reserve the main BBC Online channel for emerging truth.”

[Our emphasis]

Abbess was worried about the consequences of Harrabin’s report. People might think The Wrong Thoughts. She spelled it out:

“A lot of people will read the first few paragraphs of what you say, and not read the rest, and (a) Dismiss your writing as it seems you have been manipulated by the sceptics or (b) Jump on it with glee and email their mates and say “See! Global Warming has stopped !”

And she signed off with a threat:

“I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics.”

That means career suicide at the Beeb. Enough already, replied Harrabin.

“Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.”

The headline was changed to the bizarre “Global warming ‘dips this year’” and the paragraph removed.

A dip in warming? Isn’t that like, er… cooling?

The offending paragraph was modified to read:

“But this year’s temperatures would still be way above the average – and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.”

And we now learn:

“A minority of scientists question whether this means global warming has peaked and argue the Earth has proved more resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted.”

We offered our congratulations to Ms Abbess, but she has not responded to our request for a comment. (You can read her victory statement here or (here if that’s unobtainable).

BBC sources confirmed the authenticity of the correspondence.

The BBC provided us with this statement:

“A minor change was made to the ‘Global temperatures “to decrease”‘ piece on our website to better reflect the science. A few people including the report’s authors, the World Meteorlogical Organisation, pointed out to us that the earlier version had been ambiguous.”

[readers' emails in response to this article are here]

Timing is everything in business, and having a visionary idea too early can prove fatal. So it is with Shawn Fanning’s Snocap, which has formally announced today that it’s being acquired by Imeem. Or what’s left of it – most Snocap employees were laid off last year, with Fanning long gone.

Snocap was created to provide the mechanics and infrastructure for a “legal P2P” system based around collective licensing. There were two parts to the masterplan: a database of artists, and watermarking technology which permitted network operators to track the flows of songs around networks, so rights holders could be compensated according to usage.

That was a prophetic and incredibly far-sighted decision to take in 2002. But it’s only now the major labels are even contemplating a collective licensing regime. Long time copyright reform advocate Jim Griffin has been hired by Warner Music with the first goal to license US universities, we reported here.

Silicon Valley VCs are notorious for not understanding “old” media businesses, and most wish they would simply go away. (They’re not alone in lacking the vision thing: Ars Technica first described Snocap with the headline “Fanning behind new, pointless P2P scheme. So what should have been the cornerstone for the biggest change in copyright in 100 years won’t be around to reap the rewards.)

And for their part, many in the music business now regret not licensing Fanning’s first venture, Napster. Counting was so much easier.

Snocap was sidetracked from the masterplan, licensing music and building digital stores. The database registry has seven million songs, the company says.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.