There I was, poised to buy the new Radiohead release. But wait, what’s this? I can’t see the image of the security code I need to key in!
Eventually, with several reloads of the page, I got both a graphic and an error-free page (some elements were failing to load over a secure connection). Not sure this has been all that well tested . . . why do I think they could have simply asked Amazon to handle all the backend magic? True, Amazon isn’t much on the “set your own price” business model, but the association with this experiment might have been worth it.
I paid US$9.99, near enough. Five quid, plus a £.45 service charge. I’ll have the full release in about 5 minutes, all 48Mb of it. My hunch is, we’ll see more of this. If, as Alex Ross suggests, the order numbers are sequential, they have made connection with a lot of fans (mine was WAS4413188).
So far, so good. Sounds interesting, organically similar to Amnesiac/Hail to the Thief.
But 160 kbps? Gack. So do I wait til the diskbox ships and try to score a torrent of a higher bitrate version? Or does the bitrate vary based on what you paid? Do people who paid the full £80 get CD-quality? Oh, shut up and listen to the music . . .