This is me giving credit where credit is due: After a lengthy history of creating cynical new ways to milk money from fans, Radiohead is toning down some of their exploits. In April, the group launched a greedy contest (really just a thinly veiled iTunes/GarageBand cross-promotion) allowing users to remix "Nude." The rub? To participate in the contest, remixers would need to buy spliced up piec...

   This April's Coachella was a warning to all other outdoor music festivals that audiences want quantity and quality. Coachella's overstuffed lineup was heavy on usual suspects but skimpy on big names, and its ticket sales suffered acco...

If Prince's last-minute addition to the Coachella line-up was a desperate attempt by the event organizers to lend buzz to their festival's fairly indistinguishable line-up, they succeeded. The music blogosphere quickly lit up with accounts of how Prince stole the show, and no track from the Purple One's set attracted more buzz than this leisurely but impassioned cover of Radiohead's "Creep." ...

It drives me nuts that Radiohead is constantly depicted as this altruistic presence well above the seedy music industry, when in reality the group continually finds cynical new revenue streams. More offensive than the many ways the group has sold and re-packaged its �free� album, In Rainbows, is their current �Nude� remix contest. Dozens of bands from Public Enemy to Les Savy Fav to The ...

Nine Inch Nails unveiled yesterday a new, 36-song instrumental album with a distinctly Radiohead-ish marketing scheme. Like In Rainbows, Ghosts I � IV was recorded relatively quickly and released without advanced notice. Part of the album is available for as a free download, but for fans that like to buy up, they can drop as much as $75 on a deluxe hard copy. Before I continue, an impor...

Ever wonder why Radiohead’s music is so downtrodden? Meeting People Is Easy, a 1998 documentary that the UWM Union Theatre is screening for free tonight at 7 p.m., offers a good explanation. This heavily stylized tour film follows the band as they . . .

It's difficult to summon too much sympathy for a major record label, but a new London Times article about Radiohead�those Robbin Hood-esque rockers who, the story goes, reclaimed their music from their evil label and dropped it into the hands of the people�paints the band as the villains and the record label as the victim. The article depicts Radiohead as greedy bullies demanding unreasonable...

As I await Radiohead's "In Rainbows"... I'm waiting in line as I write this. Foolishly, I forgot to pre-order Radiohead's new pay-what-you-can digital album, so I am stuck on the band's Web site, registering for a copy that would have already been neatly e-mailed to me if I'd just planned ahead a bit. It's a slow process made slower by all the last-minute traffic sucking the bandwidth out of the...