Oasis joined the growing number of bands embracing a “free music” culture yesterday, letting fans hear their new album online before its release next week.
The band stopped short of giving away the keenly awaited Dig Out Your Soul, but thousands of fans listened to it from midday, in full and free, on the social networking website MySpace. Oasis have succumbed to the same marketing logic as Coldplay, who gave fans a preview of their new album on MySpace earlier this year.
Noel Gallagher, the band’s main songwriter, had been scathing about the trend for bands to give away music online. He was deeply critical of Radiohead’s decision last year to promote In Rainbows via an “honesty box” system where fans paid as much as they wanted to download the album. “I didn’t spend a year in the most expensive studio in England, with the most expensive producer in America and the most expensive graphic designer in London, to then give it away. F*** that,” Gallagher said at the time.
But he accepted that Radiohead’s move had been a clever publicity ploy. “To me it looked like marketing – a great way of getting a load of marketing for free really,” he said.
Figures later showed that more than a quarter of fans who downloaded In Rainbows paid either nothing for it, or only 1p. Some pundits said it was the death knell for the record industry.
Gallagher’s change of heart may have much to do with dwindling CD sales and even downloads. The music industry had hoped that the growth in legal download sites, such as Apple’s iTunes store, would cut illegal downloads. But the proportion of music fans regularly buying downloads has dropped from 16 per cent in 2006 to 14 per cent last year.
Oasis’s recent albums have not received the same critical acclaim as those of their mid-90s pomp and critics have seen the band increasingly as a stadium act rather than one that can shift millions of albums.
However, the MySpace release has helped to generate some of the old excitement about a new Oasis album.
Travis Katz, of Myspace.com – which is owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times – said that the site had premiered albums from Madonna to Coldplay. “The value you have from this sort of thing is it’s a tremendous way to create buzz about an album before it comes out in stores.”
Ben Cardew, of Music Week, said that record labels still had a future but had to adapt. “Oasis have been very traditional,” he said. “They’ve not been the most forward-looking in terms of using new technology. The album on MySpace can be streamed but can’t be bought. It’s like saying, ‘If you want to listen to it, listen to it here, please. Don’t illegally download it’. It’s better than punishing people.”
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