Hit UK band, Radiohead, who turned the music industry upside down with their trust-based approach to sales of their phenomenally-succesful 'In Rainbows' album have done it again.
In a quietly-orchestrated move, the band last night streamed the final Santa Barbara show of their US tour, making the video available to fans via the band's official website.
Little advance notice of the band's plan was given. Thursday saw the band publish an enigmatic message warning Mac users to download either Flip4Mac or VLC, because the software "might come in handy".
Hours before the event took place bassist Colin Greenwood wrote: “Hello! To celebrate the end of a brilliant tour, we’re going to webcast the last show here in America. We’ll be playing live in Santa Barbara, at the Bowl. It’s one of our favourite places to play."
"We’re going to try and share as much of it as we can on the webcast. Nigel, our producer, will be helping out getting it to you, so if it goes wrong….It’s live!"
Segments of the webcast are now beginning to emerge online, a report explains, also speculating the band made the move so quiet in order to make the best of limited bandwidth for the transmission.
That Radiohead chose to use a non-QuickTime format for the webcast isn't entirely unexpected. The band was among the last digital hold-outs, refusing to make its music available through iTunes in an attempt to preserve album sales, though the recent move to sell music through the Apple service saw Radiohead's 15-year old track, 'Creep' jump into the top 40.
The debate surrounding protection of the album format through iTunes has intensified in recent days, with labels now experimenting with removing tracks from iTunes in an attempt to preserve the format.
Meanwhile, Radiohead recently began streaming 'In Rainbows' through Last.fm.
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