What I would love to see someday: A big, established artist/band spending money on a recording studio and a producer, and recording an album. Then they put up the album on their website, (no money spent on printing CDs and shipping them to retailers), preferably through torrents, to save bandwidth. Also on the site, they have a Paypal-button (and/or something similar) which say "Here's where you can pay whatever sum you feel like for the music". The consumers can pay $50, or $5, or $0.10, or even nothing at all! And then they sit and wait (the news of the album spreading through word of mouth - no money spent on marketing) to see:

A) How long it takes before the money invested in the actual recording is paid back, with the rest basically being all profit, and

B) (If the technology allows it) Check roughly how much the average paid sum is for each time the album has been downloaded.

'Kid A' and 'Amnesiac'

... were both fantastic.

You can listen to most of the new songs on Rollingstone.com. Honestly, they didn't grab me (on first, semi-quiet listen at work).

Taft is wrong!

Seriously, there are moments on both albums that I liked and there are a few standout tracks, but I felt 'Amnesiac' in particular was pretty pretentious at times and experimental for experimental's sake.

'HttT' struck me as a happy medium... the band was trying new stuff but didn't let the songs suffer for it.

The boat has been missed by all the news rags as well as this blog.

Fact #1: Bands that sign with a major label do not own their own music.
Fact #2: Bands that sign with a major label do not see a penny from CD sales.

A band like Radiohead is popular enough, for this very common practice among working rock groups, to make a media splash. "OMG, they are giving their music away."
The way the band see's it, they are ahead by a wide margin vs signing over their work to a label.

Reason #1: They own the rights to the music they wrote.
Reason # 2: (and the most important) Label executives will tell bands that CD sales are merely marketing for them to drive up concert ticket sales. The labels are correct on this point as the band see's a good margin of the ticket sales.
Reason # 3: most highly successful bands, such as Radiohead, are not successful enough to be in a position to re-negotiate their original contracts. Only mega-successful bands can negotiate a percentage of their CD sales and only the legendary bands can negotiate back the rights to their music.

Bands are quickly discovering that the more MP3's of their's
that float around the internet, the better the ticket sales become. This way, Radiohead gets to see some sales, I call them donations, for the distribution of their music. That's revenue that they would have not seen anyway if they signed it over to EMI Records.
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Cowherd is awesome, but he needs to stick to sports. Most bands make their money on tour, not cd sales.