Days after being criticized by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon for its pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows, Radiohead has launched a download section of its official online store.
The timing is probably accidental, but it is nevertheless cool. The band's W.A.S.T.E. store is selling downloads for releases the band actually owns, including guitarist Jonny Greenwood's soundtrack for the Oscar-winning film There Will Be Blood, vocalist Thom Yorke's solo effort The Eraser, In Rainbows and In Rainbows 2 (previously available only as part of the In Rainbows box set).
More is sure to come as Radiohead pushes the envelope of digital distribution.
The store's name was cribbed from Thomas Pynchon's conspiratorial postmodern classic The Crying of Lot 49. In the book, W.A.S.T.E. is an acronym for "We Await Silent Trystero's Empire," a slogan used by a shadowy organization dedicated to alternative, perhaps anarchic, communications.
The group's symbol, the muted postal horn at right, shows up as graffiti everywhere throughout the hilarious narrative, and illustrates the subversion of accepted delivery systems: You can't blow your communications horn if it's muted by a bunch of anarchists.
It's a cool metaphor for the current brouhaha over Radiohead's subversion of the music industry's conventional distribution system. By offering its fans the opportunity to pay what they want for In Rainbows, it's arguable that Radiohead became industry anarchists. It's also arguable, as Sonic Youth's Gordon explained to The Guardian last week, that the variable-pricing release was all a hoax.
Like Lot 49's dizzy executor Oedipa Maas, it's up to you to assign meaning to what has happened. And what will happen when Trystero's empire, or the demise of the music industry as we know it, comes calling.
Clever dudes, those Radiohead lads.
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