Curtains Close on Dave Matthews Band as Radiohead Sets to Release "In Rainbows" Independently
There are a number of things that tie Dave Matthews Band to Radiohead. For one, Dave loves Radiohead to the point where he is disgusted with them.
Another similarity: both bands road-test their music. Radiohead debuted 13 tracks from "In Rainbows" starting mid-2006. Almost in parallell, for the first time in two years Dave Matthews Band road-tested a new song, Idea of You.
A crucial similarity to this article is the point that both Dave Matthews and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke have spoken out about the decline of the recording industry. The difference here is what they've done about it.
In our July article about DMB's Live Trax release at Starbucks we indicated that DMB is potentially at or approaching a level of freedom from label constraints that Radiohead enjoys. The question has been: if DMB has fulfilled its recording contract with RCA, could the band leverage distribution resources through MusicToday and retailers like Starbucks to pull off an independent release?
Both bands have pondered the question, DMB in private and Radiohead in interviews admitting last year: "for the first time, we have no contract or release deadline to fulfill - it's both liberating and terrifying". The terms of DMB's current recording contract are confidential, however there is speculation that the greatest hits album may have been one of the last, if not the last commited release with RCA.
Regardless of DMB's situation, Radiohead dropped a bomb on the entire music industry on Monday, October 1st. Radiohead announced via its official website that their new album, "In Rainbows," would be available via direct DRM-free download from their own website at any price fans would like to pay.
In one stroke Radiohead become the leader in a small group of artists willing to solidify their stance that the recording industry no longer presents a suitable suite of tools and products for their artistic expression.
Radiohead first raised the bar for all major musicians by refusing to re-sign with a record label. It blew away all expectations by allowing fans to set the price on an album the band has spent over two years creating.
Radiohead could have had an instant success and financial gain using a traditional retail release. Yet made a decision that clearly establishes them as artists willing to give up on financial incentive in order to push the music industry in the direction Yorke and Matthews have been speaking about for some time.
Dave Matthews made statements predicted a shift for the recording industry in his 1999 interview with Yahoo! Launch. This past July in an interview with Billboard Dave said "I know some people would say we're pretty mainstream, but we certainly got here in a pretty unique way and have maintained it in a pretty unique way." The context of this quote actually echos other statements in the 1999 Launch interview that suggest DMB yields more power for indepenence than other artists: "RCA has treated us with a lot of respect. There are things they could be better at, but as long as we think that, we'll have the upper hand."
Yet when you compare Dave Matthews Band to Radiohead's example, there aren't a lot of signs of independence. DMB's last studio album, Stand Up, was cloaked in DRM, disrupting a clean rip to iTunes. Then there was a complete flip where Dave releases a new solo music video for Eh-yee that you can only get on iTunes. The download was free for a few days, but now it has to be bought and viewed within the proprietary iTunes' encoded video format.
If Dave was going to go off the reservation to release something as small as a music video for "Eh-yee," why have it up for sale at all? How much money is in this move? Why not just put it out for free in an unprotected open-source format like Xvid in the first place?
There are other recent signs of how Dave's artistry is tightly wound in business that should not be ignored. Dave's decision to perform with Tim at two shows that required you to have a credit card to buy a ticket, and the bogus Hamptons benefit can not be totally offset with donations and ticket buy-backs. DMB's World's Largest Pep Rally would be something to behold if it weren't AT&T's.
If you ignore business decisions and focus on what it would take for DMB to release an album independently, you'll find it has been a discouraging past two years.
According to Stefan Lessard's blogging, Dave Matthewews Band began work on its newest studio album in March of 2006 with Mark Batson. A second confirmed studio session occurred at the end of 2006 this time with production help of jazz label veteren Steve Vining. Most recently Ants Marching reported that Mark Batson is now completely out of the picture, which follows our suggestion in April of last year that there was no reason for him to be around if DMB wasn't deliberatly working on a release.
Dave recently downplayed the internal conflict that stopped successful studio work in March and late last year. But the effect of the band's inability to complete an artistic work not only deprived everyone of a new studio album, it has also kept the band from having the opportunity to make a decision about an independent release.
In a way, comparing Dave Matthews Band's decisions to those of Radiohead isn't really fair. "In Rainbows" is to the music industry what the iPhone was to the cellular phone industry. It is a game changing, historically significant introduction. The sad thing is that next to Radiohead there was no other band more capable executing a coup of this magnitude and living through it than DMB.
