I just got my e-mail notifying me that the new Radiohead album "In Rainbows" is available for download. I bought the album for $1.09* last week from their web site when I heard that the band had ditched their record label and was self-releasing the album via digital download with "name your own price" pricing method.

Now, you might consider me a cheapskate only paying $1.09 for an album, as that is about the same price for a single song on some of the big on-line retailers. However, it is $1.09 more than Radiohead got from me for their last album, which I did not pay for nor did I download in any form.

Also, Radiohead gets to keep 100% of the money. I love the idea of paying the band directly. I had to pay an additional processing fee of about $0.98 which I can assume covers all of the credit card processing and maybe even some of the bandwidth of delivering the album over the Internet.

I have posted some screen shots of the process of getting the album: Download. Unzip. Drag into iTunes.

I am a littler disappointed that the ZIP file didn't include artwork for the album. Nor did the MP3's have the artwork embedded in the files. Also, the song's were lacking a Genre tag. What, does Radiohead not want to pigeon-hole themselves into a genre?

I think Harvey Danger did a better job of packaging their album Little By Little into a digital download back in 2005 when they released it for free and asked for donations afterwards.

Some of the biggest news surrounding Radiohead's digital release is not that you can name your own price (even $0.00) but that the songs are in a DRM-Free MP3 format giving the end users the right to play them freely on all their devices without lame restrictions.

I think these are interesting times for major label bands that have the fan base and their name built up to explore options like this. Interesting indeed.

*Radiohead is based in the UK, so I had to use Google to convert the values I wanted to pay in USD to GBP. When it was all said and done I paid about $2 even.