Radiohead's Kid A (13 page)

The pace generated by the new technology must have also appealed to the band’s management and label, as they took advantage of the internet’s promotional possibilities by developing software catered to Radiohead’s rabid online community. In addition to the aforementioned blips that spread virally throughout the web, Capitol distributed an embeddable Java applet called the “iBlip” that featured links to various multimedia like streaming audio; it even created a promotional website with music and videos accessible through the Aimster file-sharing protocol (via AOL Instant Messenger). But while this embrace of the internet was unique at the time, the industry’s
reservation with digital technology was reflected in its concerted efforts to prevent the album from leaking before its physical release date. Aside from private
Kid A
listening parties — one was at the Sony IMAX theater in New York set to a 3-D film of ocean floor, another at the Vancouver Aquarium with whales — select critics received the album on a Sony VAIO Music Clip, a $200 tampon-shaped digital player with music files encoded to prevent them from being reproduced throughout the internet.

The tampon, of course, didn’t work. Despite this and other precautionary efforts taken by the band’s label (Thom, for his part, described these efforts as “daft”),
Kid A
was uploaded to Napster in its entirety a month before its release. The Napster version of
Kid A
was reported to have been downloaded millions of times, and, despite industry chatter that the leak would harm sales,
Kid A
debuted at #1 in the UK and US, as well as in several other countries. Thom spoke enthusiastically about Napster soon afterward in an interview with
TIME
: “The cool thing about Napster is it encourages bootlegging, it encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do. […] The whole fucking thing is wonderful as far as I’m concerned.”

While it’d be an exaggeration to attribute
Kid A
’s chart success solely to Napster, this unexpected showing nonetheless provided fuel for Napster proponents who specifically cited
Kid A
as the quintessential example that the software could actually help, rather
than hurt, the music industry. But over the next ten years, the industry, as represented by trade groups like the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), would go to great lengths to try to disprove their theory.

* * *

In retrospect, the Napster controversy served as a clue to how the first decade of the new millennium would unfold. While the MP3 revolution might resemble the LP/cassette controversy decades prior, the transmission of the MP3 necessitated an entirely different infrastructure — one that came from the underground. It’s no coincidence that the MP3 itself was mobilized by independent networks of file-sharers; or that Napster was created by a college freshman rather than a multinational conglomerate; or that, generally speaking, independent music has thrived in this digital economy (no longer fully enslaved to major label distribution, cheaper promotional/production costs, the ease of circulating independent ideas/values, etc.). In fact, the distribution of the MP3 was the first significant rupture in the distribution of the music commodity since its inception.

Perhaps this is why the RIAA, clearly new kids on the digital block, attempted to extinguish the downloading onslaught with ridiculous propaganda and a whole lotta litigation, forcing down peer-to-peer sites and suing grandmas and kids because, well, it didn’t
know what else to do. It was essentially employing outdated tactics to try to quell a revolution that had not been systematically rationalized, if only because this revolution was symbolic in nature, operating outside the dictates of the top-down, vertically aligned power structures to which the industry was accustomed. Even the industry’s later attempts to fight technology with technology ended with embarrassing outcomes (cf. the Sony BMG rootkit scandal and Digital Rights Management). The industry was floundering aimlessly, showing how its fingers were ultimately in our pockets rather than on the pulse of the vibrant MP3 revolution.

The decade played out like cat and mouse between the industry and the “pirates,” with the digital music revolution decentralizing so quickly that the industry didn’t know who to sue anymore. As soon as it thought it had nipped Napster in the bud, peer-to-peer sites like Gnutella, Freenet, eDonkey2000, Kazaa, Morpheus, and Audiogalaxy caught on like wildfire. Then came the BitTorrent protocol, with services like Supernova, isoHunt, TorrentSpy, and the infamous The Pirate Bay, which further decentralized networks to the point where there were multiple clients (μTorrent, Azureus) with multiple trackers (SceneTorrents, OiNK) and multiple indexing sites (isoHunt, Mininova). The Pirate Bay soon became Napster’s successor as the poster child for illegal file-sharing and, after a raid in 2006 and convictions in 2009, was forced to shut down its tracker. The Pirate Bay fought back by obscuring responsibility even further by maintaining its services
with “magnet links,” the next evolution in the technology, which in effect undermined the necessity of trackers while still pointing users to the whereabouts of illegal content.

While the industry has since made tentative steps to embrace digital music — licensing music to online companies, promoting digitally, streaming music, etc. — it’s still hedging its bets on the use of power to control the digital music revolution. In fact, the industry is now desiring to curtail piracy by working with internet service providers (ISPs) to explore the possibilities of protocol blocking, bandwidth throttling (limiting transfer speeds), and even disconnection through what’s been called graduated response (also known as “three strikes”). The implication here is that ISPs would have not only the right but also the obligation to monitor internet activity, raising serious doubts about the digital future’s protection of privacy and due process. (Graduated response has already been implemented in several countries, though not without resistance.)

For all of the industry’s rhetoric about fighting on behalf of the artist, it became clear that, throughout this whole fiasco, no money was being distributed to its “clients.” By the end of the decade, some of the world’s largest music acts showed little faith in the major music industry to promote and sell their music. Madonna, Prince, The Eagles, Nine Inch Nails, Joni Mitchell, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Paul McCartney would all join Radiohead in leveraging their cultural cache to move forward without major label support.

* * *

McLuhan might’ve seen the industry’s litigations as a print-culture mentality meeting an electronic-culture reality. The MP3 was propagating itself organically, but the industry’s initial hesitancy to seriously engage with digital music has shown why their slow-drag into the digital recycle bin isn’t surprising: it didn’t adapt.

The implication of new technology is that templates of yore will eventually be de-emphasized, become obsolete, or be replaced. For the music world, this meant just about the entire industry — traditional record labels, pressing plants, retail stores, distribution, promotion, radio stations. Gone are the days of Big Artists and Big Albums; gone are the days of big box music stores competing with local independent shops; gone are the days when major music groups can maintain the dominance they achieved during the heyday of physical music-selling. In their place came MP3 blogs, YouTube, iTunes, subscription models, pirating software, and MySpace streams; everything became niche because the internet fostered more outlets for technological innovation and more audiences to test them out. The industry was suddenly faced with the reality that the material logic of the commodity ceased to hold its relevance in a digital economy, while artists who quickly embraced the technology, like Radiohead, would flourish.

Here,
Kid A
becomes not just “an album” but also an experience of different media, marked most dramatically by the multiple versions that pervaded the
collections of millions of fans. I’ve experienced this shift firsthand through my own copies of
Kid A
. Ten years ago, the primary medium I used to listen to
Kid A
was the compact disc: I had the regular CD version for my dorm and the children’s book version for my car; at one point, I transferred the CD to minidisc for outside strolls, and a few years later I purchased the vinyl version. But for the majority of this decade, I’ve listened to
Kid A
on MP3. Early MP3 versions were attained (illegally) through file-sharing software — first Napster, then Soulseek — while the MP3s I currently listen to were downloaded (illegally) from a private BitTorrent tracker. Over the years, I’ve had MP3s of the album spread across several drives at various encodings, including 128 kbps, 160 kbps, 192 kbps, 320 kbps, and variable bit rate. I even downloaded a FLAC version just in case and a shitty 8 kbps version just for kicks. This year, I streamed
Kid A
for the first time.

This ease in digital reproduction gives credence to Walter Benjamin’s observation that “the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility”:
Kid A
was designed to be reproduced, transmitted, and reproduced again. In fact, that it could be both reproduced and transmitted outside the demands of the major label industry is the most convincing reason why the MP3 ruptured the industry in a way that artistic movements (free jazz, hip-hop, noise) could only approximate: the technological resources and intellectual know-how were there to mobilize it from the bottom up. But the exchange of MP3s
throughout the internet was also remarkably different in nature than the shelving of CDs in a music store. With the MP3, music stopped functioning like a “sign” that could be bought and sold like a commodity; it was instead placed on the level of what Jean Baudrillard called “symbolic exchange.” While a sign adheres to capitalism, symbolic exchange functions more like a gift, undercutting the very heart of free-market ideology. The symbolic exchange of the MP3, then, would ultimately serve to undermine an industry that ultimately had no gift to give in return.

Not that this shift to a digital medium was without precedent. In fact, it’s argued that, since the early twentieth century, virtually all music became electronic music. Whether or not the music is composed of “electronic instruments” is immaterial to the fact that most performed sound is nonetheless electrically amplified. The importance of this sound conversion — from analog to digital, acoustic sound to electric signal — can’t be overstated: not only did the switch dislodge music from the performance space (e.g. the concert hall) but also it precipitated a rush of technology aiming to distribute music to every nook and cranny in the world. This was an early sign that the recording industry was building a house on sand: once music became subsumed into an electronic economy, an infrastructure based on physical material could only incite interest through scarcity (limited-edition releases), packaging (box sets, album artwork), and ideology (support artists, capitalism = good).

Free from the limitations of physical formats — indeed, a spatial concern — the MP3 could now rearticulate music’s temporal relationship with the medium, exposing music’s previous dependence on time restrictions. This relationship is most noticeable on an aesthetic level: throughout the history of recorded music, musicians have largely played to the medium, creating songs/albums/collections with direct awareness of the medium’s length requirements — 3 minutes for 78s, 45 minutes for the vinyl LP, 74 or 80 minutes for the CD — there were even attempts to augment these restrictions by experimenting with two sides of a slab of vinyl or creating multiple-disc CD changers. The digital medium, however, introduces an open-ended format that demarcates a shift from the isolated single or album to a continuous, neverending playlist, where listening becomes increasingly personalized, interactive, and patterned. It’s a temporal freedom that has threatened the endurance of the album tradition: the beginnings and endings of albums — irrelevant to the continuous flow of a playlist — are being de-emphasized, while “bonus” and “hidden” tracks (like the one on
Kid A
) already feel like relics from a distant past.

Things are quickly changing elsewhere, too. With physical collections (CDs, LPs, etc.) migrating to hard drives, advancements in space and increased downloading speeds have produced a mentality of boundless accumulation, where our tastes are publicly displayed through social-networking tools like
Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm rather than shelved in the privacy of our homes. Sound quality is sacrificed for portability and accessibility (a 128 kbps MP3 eliminates roughly 90 percent of the information found on a CD, which itself is already compressed), while consumption becomes increasingly dependent on a continually expanding network of hard drives, operating systems, processors, software, ISPs, speakers, and portable music players. For many people, downloading has already outpaced their ability to listen to all of it, which may perhaps be seen as an idiosyncratic stockpiling phase before data transfer fully replaces physical transaction. We’re not far off from our music collections departing completely from our hard drives, where music will stream from the so-called “cloud,” in which taste will act like filters on a boundless database of music that’s stored on nameless servers and accessed remotely (Google and Apple are quickly working to debut their own cloud-based services). Here, music will be about access, not ownership, with our consumption practices expressed through faster speeds, shorter durations, and a new technological rhythm.

Indeed, if these new technologies are telling us anything it’s that time, not space, has dominated our recent interactions with media. As McLuhan put it, “For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man, it is time that occupies the same role.” Simply observing the pace set by new media points to a swift temporal transition into a faster, more dynamic way of experiencing new sounds, facilitating
new connections, and making new discoveries. From hype cycles and internet memes to real-time search results and instant messaging, our perception of time has contracted considerably, with the duration between action and reaction so compressed that our sense of scale has dramatically changed while electronic culture’s virtues of multiplicity, pluralism, and interrelation come into even sharper relief. Whether all of this is good or bad isn’t my concern here; there’ll always be fans who will play a heavyweight vinyl version of
Kid A
through their hi-fi stereo and cradle the artwork in their arms, regardless of any technological advancements. But there’s no question that these new technologies have attuned our perceptions to a quickened cultural pace that renders previous patterns of consumption inappropriate for younger generations of music fans.