Maybe you've heard that the latest Radiohead album was available to download from Wednesday. The most sensational thing is that you can decide how much you want to pay (after the 45p transaction fee), which is very brave of them. It's great the way they've cut out the fatcat middlemen. However I just read that they'll be releasing a cd version next year and it seems that the whole download thing is more of a promo for the cd version, especially considering that the encoding quality is half that of a usual Radiohead download - which is kind of disappointing. Having said that, I encode most of my albums at 160kps which is perfectly adequate most of the time. Considering the poor sound quality of some commercial releases, a lot of people seem to be indifferent about optimum sound quality even if they say they do. I wonder how many people would complain about sound quality if their mp3 player or software didn't actually reveal what the encoding rate was (but then I guess Radiohead are a fave of geeks).... incidentally I paid £3.50 for the album which is pretty much the most I'll pay for albums thanks to ebay and amazon marketplace. If it all goes straigh to the band in this case, it'll still be a fair amount considering how much the record labels usually cream off for themselves.

I got another download bargain this week. I bought the hits of angsty grungerockers P.O.D. from iTunes for £2.99. I'm sure it's an error on iTunes (considering you can buy the tracks seperately for the normal price of 79p) which seems to have gone unnoticed or ignored for quite a while judging by the reviews on that page in the store. It's a little known fact that jetpack enjoys grungey guitar music from time to time...