Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon has spoken out on Radiohead’s “pay-what-you-want” for In Rainbows release and her opinion on the influential scheme kind of echoes Robert Smith’s rant from a few months back.
“[Radiohead] did a marketing ploy by themselves and then got someone else to put it out,” Gordon told The Guardian’s David Peschek. “It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn’t catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don’t sell as many records as them. It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever. It was a good marketing ploy and I wish I’d thought of it! But we’re not in that position either. We might not have been able to put out a record for another couple of years if we’d done it ourselves: it’s a lot of work. And it takes away from the actual making music.”
This issue has come up from Robert Smith and others before, including Paul McCartney: Bands that fill arenas are able to sustain themselves entirely by feeding on their own fan base, but smaller bands often need to make more money to keeping going until they can have a big fan base of their own. Have bands like Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails become a Wal-Mart-esque force that drives away Mom and Pops?