More worryingly, in a sneaky move by EMI to cash in on Radiohead’s popularity, EMI had been running a scam ad campaign on Google until the end of last week, purporting to already have the new Radiohead album “In Rainbows” in boxset and CD versions for sale even before the official release in December. In an attempt to obviously mislead and cheat users, EMI used the phrase “Rainbow” in the ad which appears as a paid listing at the top of search results when users searched for the keyword “Radiohead” in Google.
Clicking on the ad instead led users to EMI/ Parlophone’s own site selling Radiohead’s back catalogue boxset of 7 albums with no sight of the promised new album “Rainbow”.
Ultimately, this is not just about “In Rainbows” or back catalogue sales only, but about a misleading ad by EMI seeking potential customers in a search environment in which the users are hitherto uninitiated about the product. Hence the users effort to search and find out more about the product in question instead leads them trickily to another place (even though we have to admit that this other place has fine products albeit an overpriced USB set) – there are advertising laws against this practice.
More details here: http://www.music2dot0.com/archives/82

Of course this is not an option for every band, but if all the superstar-bands that actually benefited from the old system to get to where they are, and now subsequently decide to go totally “indie” where are the major labels going to find the mega-revenues that used to subsidize the rest of the money-losing acts in their stable?

For those who want a full analysis of this offering I have consolidated all the details in this analysis at http://www.music2dot0.com/archives/47

Trent Reznor was especially mad with the major labels for trying to rip off fans and he highlights that instead of using the widespread reach of the internet to further enhance distribution, labels spend more energy to create digital domain roadblocks in order to preserve their existing fat margins via traditional distribution. For full text of my chat with Reznor in China you can go to http://www.music2dot0.com/archives/36