News Free Radiohead album distributed by pirates

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/10/18/free_radiohead_album_distributed_by_pirates/1

Radiohead's latest album was made available over the Internet for as little as fans wanted to pay, which was too much apparently.

 

Not really surprising is it, any chart topping band will be torrented eventually.

 

Quite sad really, I got it from the Radiohead site and put in the sum of £0.00
Maybe people don't realise you can actually do that or as in the article, people find it easier to go to their torrent sites and hit that download button.

 

Not a surprise at all, there will be some people who won't have realized you can get it for free, or they don't know where to get it from so they revert back to there normal source (torrent sites, etc).

 

I downloaded from the official site for free and didn't like it. I was planning on paying £4 or something if I had liked it. I really didn't though and it hasn't even made its way onto itunes.

 

So what's the difference between downloading it from Radiohead's site for £0.00 and getting it from BitTorrent?

 

there cheap arses! you can't get better than free and direct

 

It undermines the whole idea. Radiohead can give it to you for free if they want to, but for you to give a free copy to someone else is wrong. You could look at it as Radiohead wanting all the traffic through their own site so they can track the number of downloads etc. - that might have some value to them which you are denying by getting the album from a torrent. However, the flip side is you could say you are saving their bandwidth, so I guess you can look at it both ways.

 

where?

 

The latter is a tad arbitrary...

 

I always wonder with these things just how many of the people who torrent it would have actually bought it anyway?

I would expect most decent human beings to, when presented by a 'name your own price' offer for a band they like, to at least give a couple of quid for the music (especially knowing this will go direct to the band not some record label). But then i'd also expect regular torrent users to download it just because it's available, whether they actually like it or not.

So i think it is wrong to equate illegal downloads to lost sales, i think this is being blown out of proportion by people trying to sell DRM systems to record companies.

 

over there - look!

 

I paid them 5 quid for the album but the rip was only 160kbps, so i plan to get it from a torrent site at a higher bitrate when it's available.

 

Is that the best bitrate available for download? If I was paying for it I would certainly want a better bitrate than that.

 

To me it undermines the whole idea of releasing a CD for free by not distributing it to torrent site. I'm not sure what their motives are for doing this, but it seems hypocritical for them to offer free copies of their CD but say only they can give it out. Also, fail to see how this is an illegal download if they're giving it away themselves, I don't think I would label it pirating at all, its really just another path for distribution.

 

i figured people would go to the torrents for the higher DL speeds. and if your not going to pay for it, whats it matter if you get it from Radiohead or any other source. i got a copy from a friend cause i wanted to hear it first to know what i would pay for it. I will be paying about $5 for it. I feel thats a fair price for an bit of digital data. and its still more then they would be getting from their label. if it were an actual physical CD i would pay $10

 

I know people who pirate Firefox.

 

It is really pirating if something is free anyway? Surely it's just another distribution method/source?

 

Truth is, if it were not for bit-tech, I wouldn't have known you could download it for free on there own site.
I imagine many other people are in the same boat.

 

i dont find that suprising at at all. you can enter a price of 00.00 and download the album for free... but that involves registering first. its just a bit of a hassle. i would rather hit up BT and get it. that is familiar to me