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Author | New boy
"The Internet has changed."
In a recent interview with WIRED, members of the veteran British band Radiohead and team staff expressed this view.
Stanley Donwood, an artist who has designed a lot of visual works such as record covers for Radiohead, said that when the Internet first emerged, he thought it might make the world a better place, and now he feels that the Internet has been reversed 180 degrees, becoming "extremely dangerous, boring, annoying and stupid." ”
What upset band lead singer Thom Yorke was the algorithm's on-demand feeding. Thom Yorke believes that if a person loves music, he will try to seek challenges and surprises. "It's like when I first heard the band CAN, I felt like I couldn't understand it at all, but it was important."
And now, Thom Yorke says, "all online behavior is analytics and then consumption conversion." The concept is based on the willingness of users to buy it, and we are told that what we get is what we like. However, "when music starts to follow its own algorithms, that's when you're finished." ”
Radiohead team members seem like a bunch of outdated anti-technologyists, otherwise Radiohead has never been on the opposite side of technology, they are the first band to build an official website, and even, as early as the beginning of the 21st century, Radiohead already had its own concept of social networking.
"On top of that, everybody has their own space, and you can decorate it the way you want, kind of like a weird version of Facebook." Thom Yorke described.
Radiohead didn't build its own Facebook, but it did a lot of online experiments. They offer downloads on their own websites, they let listeners buy digital albums at their own prices, they build their own online communities, they try genuine BT downloads, they recently partnered with a speaker brand to create their own 24-hour online radio station...
Whatever they do, they follow one principle: the mastery must be in the hands of the band itself. "We don't like to do the things that record companies let artists do." Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood explains. Now that the Internet has changed, Radiohead is also changing its strategy.
So there was a major revision of the band's official website in January this year.
Radiohead official website revision announcement
The revision announcement said that Radiohead.com used to be an annoying, small-information, and surprising website, and now the most surprising thing is that it will become incredibly informative.
Indeed, Radiohead .com is becoming very rich, because the website designer Max Kolombos is carrying all the music, video, and text materials of Radiohead little by little, and named the site "Radiohead Public Library", Radiohead Public Library.
According to the band's ideas, users can find everything about Radiohead in this, and, moreover, its set life cycle is, eternal.
Max Kolombos, who has worked for Radiohead for 20 years, said the idea began two years ago, when a child from one of his relatives came to help him with the website, and the child had never heard of Radiohead, so he scoured the Internet, and the things they found were messy, often with donkey lips not on the horse's mouth.
Max Kolombos himself has a deep understanding: "I collect information about Radiohead online, and there is always a sense of frustration. I feel like I'm good enough about my internet literacy, but I still often get nothing. So Max Kolombos set out to build the Radiohead Public Library.
Colin Greenwood's 000001 "Reading Card"
Over the past two years, radiohead public libraries have accumulated a large number of radiohead audio and video materials, and have aggregated tour information, websites, social accounts and peripheral products of the band and band members.
Radiohead Public Library seems to be Radiohead's stronghold, but Radiohead thinks more deeply about the concept of this camp: "There is a lot of production on the Internet every day, the river of streaming media is flooding, and we are building an island and throwing a bunch of rocks into the river so that it can be seen." Thom Yorke said.
While the Radiohead Public Library doesn't seem too complicated right now, it's really a big project, and even radiohead band members have been moving bricks themselves for over a year, so much so that Colin Greenwood complains about not having time to do what he wants to do, and Thom Yorke feels a little overloaded: "If we want to put more content, we're going to have to do some damn work, I'm not sure if it works." ”
But Thom Yorke still felt, OK.
Thom Yorke recently gave a live show in his basement, and the video can also be found on the Radiohead Public Library
Radiohead's approach is in line with the wave of reflection on the Internet at home and abroad in recent years.
There is a view that as the platform continues to grow stronger, users (including musicians) are becoming vassals of the platform, and user-generated content and related data become the golden key to the platform.
In the early days of the development of the Internet, doing their own website is a trend, and now, for reasons such as convenience, everyone has become accustomed to ceding the dominance to major platforms, so the platform with technical support such as algorithms has mastered the power of content, and musicians have to watch their hard-earned music works eventually be swallowed up by the Internet, and all they can get is a cup of water traffic income.
Musician David Byrne laments that the internet has become a black hole that devours all ideas.
So, there's another view that musicians need to rethink the future, build a space of their own, and make the platform a channel that is only for musicians, not a controller – in foreign countries, some capable musicians are doing this, and musician Imogen Heap even uses blockchain.
Anyway, for now, what Radiohead wants to do is to gather everything related to the band, try to take its own fate into its own hands, and then say.
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