Completely Ridiculous Radiohead Music Experiment
Am I alone in thinking these new shock horror reports about Radioheads’ online music experiment are completely ridiculous?
PaidContent today picked up on a story by Big Champaign, a company which monitors file sharing activity. Mashable then joined in with an article entitled “Free wasn’t cheap enough for Radiohead fans†and All things Digital even put up a story about it.
Mashable had this to say on the subject:
“Free isn’t cheap enough for us, apparently. When a band like Radiohead comes out with an album, puts it up on a website for us, and gets more press coverage than just about any album release in recent memory, and says “Hey, pay us for it if you want to,“ we still feel the need to “steal it†off Bittorrent.â€
I have no intention of going into the ethics of downloading music, I just found this such a completely pointless report. He continues with this:
“In Rainbows torrent downloads peaked on the first day data was collected, October 27, at 400,000 - what Page and Garland call “a bloody big numberâ€. How big? More than double the top torrent through March and May (Panic At The Disco’s Pretty Odd) got in a whole week (ie. 10 times Panic’s daily average).â€
What these reports all seem to forget is that Radiohead is a big band. One of the biggest in the world in fact, but contrast Panic at the Disco is not. Would you expect more people to be interested in Radiohead?
Also most importantly does anyone remember Radiohead’s download server’s crashing due to the amount of demand? Even when it was operating it sure was pretty damn slow to download the album, how does it not make sense that people would just use Bittorrent to get the album.
Considering Radiohead was giving the album for free, you could say it was even beneficial to download from bittorrent seeing as it would save the bandwidth for Radiohead.
I personally would be extremely hesitant to mouth off and tell article just about sums it up perfectly:
“andrew, why don’t you let anyone on the web take your column and post it free, and not get paid by the ft, either…since you love free love and allâ€
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The warning message about AAC streams when you load streams is because you don’t have the free Orban AAC/aacPlus Player Plugin installed.
http://codecpack.co/download/Orban-aacPlus-Player-Plugin.html
Justin, thanks for the information.
does this support AAC ? or only mp3 streaming
I’d say it supports all pls streams but I have not tried that so cannot verify it 100%.
Thank you Martin for a most informative and viable solution (it allowed me to play streams from a Netherland internet radio station in my WMP)! Continued success to you!
Barnabas (USA)
Your steps’ recommendation is still valid until 7th October 2012.. Thank you very much !!
Thank you!
You must convert file.pls to file.m3u
because file.pls open with winamp and file.m3u open with wmp.
Hi
2017 still kicking on Windows 7
Thx a ton
Hey, even i can do it, i stumbled through it and it works great! The only instruction advice i will add as i had to figure this out, when the wmp box opens that says save or open the bar on right says wmp click that drop down and select “open pls in wmp” once you do that it will work . Took me quite some time to discover that as i am no computer expert by any means. Having said that, previously i had downloaded codec packages and something about aac. None did any good. This rocks, i listen to a lot of internet radio and a number of them have dropped flash player and getting wmp to work had been a nightmare. So many thanks for this great solution to another problem that Micro-Hell will not even address. Peace- Out
openplsinwmp came in a zip file. I unpacked it, and didn’t find anything that looks like an executable, and even the files in the “doc” folder were in a format windows didn’t recognize. I’m not stupid. you said it would open effortlessly. It didn’t. This a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down.