In honor of our 33 1/3 sale, we've been featuring blog posts from some of the people behind the 33 1/3 series. In this post, Scott Plagenhoef — who wrote the volume on Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister — discusses Radiohead's new album, In Rainbows, available (for now) only online.

October 19, 2007
Every record from Radiohead draws quite a bit of attention in music circles: From message boards to the New Yorker, Radiohead have served as a go-to example of the power and possibility of rock music — until they swung too far to the weird for some and instead wound up becoming one of the world's largest cult bands.

As Radiohead have since learned, that's not such a bad thing to be. With a loyal, built-in audience in tow, the group have been able to sidestep many of the supposed necessities in music marketing — singles, videos — and with its new record (it's named In Rainbows, by the way), they're initially attempting to outflank the entire industry: In Rainbows is currently only available via a band-created website. "Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want," read a headline on Time.com, which went on to breathlessly call the album "easily the most important release in the recent history of the music business." What Radiohead have done, for now, is given consumers a choice between an elaborate and expensive deluxe box and an official leak of the record's digital files, for which you can pay what you want. (Computer-savvy, unscrupulous music listeners normally pay absolutely nothing for these files.) The band has already announced that the record will be issued as a regular old CD sometime after the holiday shopping season.

This system-smashing gesture, therefore, turns out to be a bit of a reverse bait-and-switch: The group is offering a pricey box set for release in December (the band is charging £40, including shipping) as the only current consumer choice, and then giving away what we already can get for free (the album's actual music), but hoping you pay for the files. It's as weirdly conservative as it is revolutionary, a convoluted pricing and release schedule which banks on listeners wanting a high-end product rather than simply desiring the music itself. Radiohead are asking you to value the presentation — the tangential and the tangible — rather than the actual sounds coming out of your speakers. The weirdest twist in the entire tale, therefore, is the band admitting what any teenager with a high-speed computer and a sense of entitlement will tell you: To a large subset of "consumers," music is no longer worth the price of the CDs it's printed on....

Click here to read the rest of the blog post, and check out all of our posts from 33 1/3 authors.

Zooey speaks, chasing the quiet. The others are thankful just to hear a voice, to escape their own thoughts.

He says, "I stayed overnight once with a woman whose mother had asked for a coffin with a glass lid so she could see all her friends dancing at the wake, giving thanks for the forces that brought them together."

"Did they do it?" Bagheera asks.

"Not the glass lid. But apparently it made everyone feel better, telling the story. And they did dance."

Fup wasn't much of a dancer, but she had her moments.

Bear confirms, "We should dance."

Soon, but not quite yet. When they're ready, no doubt Oreo and Chester will be the ones to get them started.

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Ron Silberstein, assistant manager of Powell's Technical Books, remembers Fup on the Powell's blog. See what friends and readers are saying, and leave comments of your own.

In lieu of cards or flowers, please consider a donation to the Oregon Humane Society in Fup's name.

We'll check in with Zooey, Bear, Bagheera, Oreo, and Chester in the next edition of PowellsBooks.news (November 14). In the meantime, on behalf of us all, thanks very much for your kind thoughts.