In April 2006 I saw Jane Siberry do a gig in Brussels. I won't labour you with the details but suffice to say she was – at least that night – away with the fairies. It was a terrible, toe-curling fest of an evening, certainly the worst gig of 2006 that I'd seen. But one thing about the night was very memorable. About half way into her set Jane (who was then, and still is, without a record contract) announced she'd be selling copies of her albums after the gig but – and this is where it got memorable - she had no pricelist as she was leaving it to us to decide what we wanted to pay for each CD. Now that was something I'd never heard of before, or since.

Until this week that is.

This week saw Radiohead pull a Jane Siberry, with their announcement that their new album "In Rainbows" is coming out on October 10th and they too are letting fans decide what they want to pay for a download. It's one thing for a briefly acclaimed, bare-footed, earth-loving, new age Canadian chanteuse to do this, it is quite another thing for of the most established bands in the world to do so.

Radiohead have however gone one step further and also provided fans the alternative of buying a 'disc box' (containing the album on both CD and on 2 x vinyl records, lyric booklets and an extra CD containing new songs). The disc box is being sold for UK£40 (approx 58 euros). There's no record label in the loop, this is Radiohead offering the new album – download and disc box versions - direct to their fans with infrastructures they are putting in place themselves.

On many levels this is just the sort of major industry-shaking move I was previously expecting from Radiohead. On the surface they have really delivered – a major established act free of record label contractual chains choosing to allow access to downloads of their new music for whatever a fan is prepared to pay, and backing it up with a pricy deluxe "disc box" for those prepared to dip deeper into their pockets. There are a few important unknowns about the download offering that despite all the brou-hah this week still, as far as I know, need to be cleared up. I'm talking about:

• Are the downloads DRM-free?
• Are they in MP3 format?
• What bit rate will the files be encoded with?

I could find no details on www.inrainbows.com on these points. Nonetheless, for the moment it is one-nil to Radiohead, something though I think could easily change…

See, I've been doing a bit of rummaging about the venture and the more I dig out the more doubts start to rise. Hear me out. The digital component of this release, while not a new idea, has just grown hugely in its potential because of the simple fact that - finally - an act with massive reach have embraced it. However it is not the embracing of an idea that needs to be judged but its execution. And I think there are grounds to fear that the execution of this idea will not go all swimmingly.

To make this happen the most vital thing Radiohead need to ensure is that the www.inrainbows.com website they have set up for fans to download the album / buy the disc box is hosted by a world class (I repeat: world class) hosting company, someone who has the experience and hardneck infrastructure required to run a high profile, intensely trafficked transactional website capable of dealing simultaneously with sudden traffic surges, thousands of visitors and the serving up of potentially tens of thousands of downloads in any given moment. And to do so without a hitch. Without such infrastructure behind it there could be a major meltdown of the website, especially on October 10th when people start downloading the album. And a server meltdown, if it were to happen, would quickly become the story, drowning out the 'shaking-the-music-industry-at-its-roots' line currently all over the blogosphere (and about to infiltrate Mondeo-man's world via this weekend's Sunday newspapers no doubt). If precautions are not taken place this could all backfire spectacularly for Radiohead (in a similar fashion, if not more so, to how in the past U2 got lambasted by fans for website oversights).

So in light of such risks Radiohead will have gone and roped in a world class web hosting company for this, right? Wrong. See, Radiohead have instead decided to give the job to a t-shirt shop.

Okay I'm being facetious. But just a bit.

The www.inrainbows.com website is being hosted by www.sandbag.uk.com, who are principally an online seller of t-shirts for various third parties. Reading between the lines of their 'About us' page Sandbag seems to be a spin off of W.A.S.T.E. (who have been selling Radiohead's merchandise for about 10 years).

Sandbag's main line of business today is setting up and managing similar online merchandise (including ticketing) services for other bands such as Keane, REM and Supergrass. They now also do bit of business on the side in providing basic web hosting services targeted at bands. Now, I've done plenty of research into web hosting companies over the years (with a view to finding the best home for this darned CLUAS site) and I can confidently say there is nothing special in their hosting services. What is clear is that Sandbag's core business is helping bands sell t-shirts and other merchandise online and overseeing the shipping of them to customers. Web hosting is NOT their core business (and not, by extension, their core competency).

Maybe I am wrong and Sandbag have what it takes in terms of infrastructure and employ a battle-hardened dream team of geeks to oversee it. But so far it's not looking good.

How about that Sandbag hosting infrastructure? Well within a day of Radiohead's announcement the www.inrainbows.com site had its first meltdown. And the traffic that caused the meltdown was people just looking for standard web pages with text and pictures and submitting credit card details, not people trying to download weighty MP3s, as they will try to do in their tens of thousands at a time on the site come Oct 10th. Had they done no stress-testing of the server before its launch? You can be sure that such a high profile web site, if it had been hosted with a world class outfit, would have stress-tested it before letting the world know about it.

How about the Sandbag geek team overseeing www.inrainbows.com? They must know what they're doing, even if the infrastructure is not the most robust? Here I also have my serious doubts. Try this for size: at the time of writing (and constantly over the last two days) inrainbows.com as a website does not exist. I repeat: it does not exist. I am serious. Try it out yourself. See what I mean?

What is happening - as I run the risk of going all abstract - is that to access inrainbows.com you must put the "www." before the domain name to access the site. If you don't, you get an error because, as far as the internet is concerned, inrainbows.com quite literally does not exist. And why? Because whoever is in charge of hosting the website (that'll be sandbag) forgot to make the most elementary of configuration settings to what is called the 'NameServer' (a 'Nameserver' is responsible for directing all domain name requests typed into browsers to the right IP number of the domain, it's like the telephone directory of domain names). This is a very basic thing to do, one that any wannabee web geek will know. Nonetheless the sandbag guys forgot (or did not know?) to do it. Are they really ready for what is about come their way? Such an 'amateur hour' oversight does not raise my confidence.

What it boils down to is that Radiohead - by declining the option of getting a world class, experienced web hosting company to provide the vital infrastructure required for a venture as bold as this - are greatly increasing the risk of scuppering the whole thing.

Putting it another way, www.inrainbows.com is a dam at genuine risk of bursting on October 10th. Adequate preparation for such a possibility would mean Radiohead having more than a few loosely packed sandbags at their disposal. Excuse me as I stick with the whole dam theme, but - inverting the Dutch legend of Hans Brink who saved Haarlem from a leaking dam with a single digit - Radiohead would do well to get their finger out over the coming week.

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For the last few months, I have eschewed my eclectic dial twiddling to concentrate on listening to the output of Phantom FM on the basis that, I am in the market for new music, by which I mean music that sounds new and has not just been released lately. On my MP3 player at present sits, to give a few examples, music by Emma Kirkby, Regina Spektor, Alison Krauss, John Tavener, Miles Davis, AC/DC, Modest Mouse, Clive Barnes, Nursat Fateh Ali Kahn, Jan Garbarek, Joan Osbourne, John Spillane, Brad Mehldau, Prince, Ray LaMontagne, Solomon Burke, Metallica and Laura Veirs. A pretty wide range of music I would think, much of it recent, and all of it individualistic. My taste has always moved between genres; in the same year that I bought albums by Steve Earle and The Police, I also bought records by Ted Hawkins, Tom Waits and Tommy Makem & The Clancy Brothers. Much of the above is not often heard, if at all, on Irish commercial radio stations.

So, you would think that I would be the ideal target audience for Phantom FM. Well, think again because I have found the choice of music I have listened to on Phantom FM to be monochromatic and, well, rather samey. A bit like eating nothing else but chicken curry for two months. Far from offering choice and new music, the station is offering up a diet of shows where the playlists are interchangeable. Ok, its only been on air a few months I know but its still hard to talk about single show having a unique personality and I certainly could not imagine the station ever offering a home to individualistic broadcasters such as John Kelly, Andy Kershaw or the great BP 'The Beep' Fallon.

However, the format of Phantom is very familiar and after a while I twigged why. Phantom FM is essentially a single genre US style radio station in disguise. Far from offering a wider choice of new music, if thats what you want to call Artic Monkeys, it is actually offering a narrower choice. I always felt that 'indie kids' had a very narrow and not very exciting taste in music. Now, I have the proof. Think I'll stick to roaming the dial for another while. 

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We hope that by now our regular readers are regularly visiting the Take Away Shows, the indie-busking series of films featured on French music blog La Blogothèque.

The latest addition to their stellar archive is Elvis Perkins, one of the essential new American acts of the year. His debut album, 'Ash Wednesday', is a fine collection of stark and heartfelt acoustica which will be sure of a place in the upper reaches of the 2007 best-of polls.

The Take Away Show team filmed two Perkins songs: below, you can watch 'While You Were Sleeping', filmed in Place Vendôme (home to exclusive jewellers and the Ritz Hotel). Perkins serenades a rather sceptical-looking toddler and various groups of tourists (gathering in front of the Ritz due to it being the point where Princess Diana et al started their ill-fated flight from the paparazzi in 1997) before heading up to the Opèra to find (quelle coincidence!) his band waiting for him on the steps.

If you visit the Take Away Show site you can watch the second clip, a medley of 'Emile's Vietnam In The Sky' and 'All The Night Without Love' performed at plush department stores Printemps and Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann. The security guards aren't too impressed, but Elvis handles them with Parisian sang froid.

Here's 'While You Were Sleeping':

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If you were at Daft Punk's Marlay Park show in the summer of 2006, then you may have seen this band, the support act that evening. We doubt you could have forgotten them.

From the east Paris suburb of Montreuil, Fancy are a three-piece group that mix New York Dolls glam and AC/DC hard rock the way teenagers mix lager and cider. The results are just as potent (but less likely to have you getting sick all over yourself).

Feather boas, razor-sharp cheekbones, spandex, lashings of make-up, squally guitars, confused sexuality - in other words, a proper pop band! Hurrah!

We reckon they sound a lot like The Gossip (which is a good thing) - even down to the Beth Ditto-esque screams of lead singer Jessie Chaton. And yes (before your parents ask pop's greatest question: 'Is that a boy or a girl?'), Jessie is a man, with the same helium voice as our other French pop discovery of 2007, Christophe Willem.

And just to show that Chaton has got credentials, you've already been dancing all year to one of his songs - he co-wrote 'D.A.N.C.E.' by Justice.

Their new album, modestly titled 'Kings Of The World', has just come out in France. It being Fashion Week in Paris, and given Fancy's sound and look, the record has come at just the right time to be the soundtrack for some serious pouting and flouncing.

No Irish dates upcoming for Fancy, although if you're in London on 22 November you can catch them at Koko with OK Go and Simian Mobile Disco.

Check out some of their tracks on their MySpace page. Here's the video for their single '17 (Wollmar Yxkullsgatan)'. You can leave out the bit in brackets when you're asking the DJ for it:

 

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Review Snapshot:
An ambitious 'organic dance' album that lets itself down with bad production, outdated dancefloor sounds and a basic misunderstanding of what an eclectic record should sound like. 

The CLUAS Verdict: 4 out of 10

Full Review:
Straight outta Cornwall, Rairbirds have been active in the UK for most of the last decade with their brand of organic dance - no samples, just live instrumentation. Unfortunately, this long-time-coming first album has all the hallmarks of being sat on and fiddled with for too long.

Fair play to them, it must be said, for their ambition in gathering a variety of sounds and influences: dancefloor-fillers, jazz-style workouts and late sixties rock (including a cover of Dylan's 'It's Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding') are all thrown in there.

However, there's a basic conceptual flaw with this record: as can be clearly heard on 'Unknown', these different sounds are just stuck together like Lego bricks of different shapes and colours. What this means for the listener is that the tracks cut sharply from chilled to bangin' and back again, wrecking every buzz it creates. Being eclectic like a radio show (lots of styles presented separately one after the other) is no model for making an eclectic record (lots of styles mashed together to create one new style). 

And the dance parts - Hacienda-style anthems with naff titles like 'Lo 2 Hi' and 'B Sum 1' - sound dated compared to more accomplished contemporaries like Justice and Digitalism, both of whom make real-deal eclectic dance music that's fresh in both composition and production.

Speaking of which, the production on this record is terrible: can that really be an actual orchestra (the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, seeing as you asked) sounding as flat and tinny as a keyboard setting?

There are lots of good intentions and plenty of energy on this record, but little in the way of anything exciting, memorable or well-made. Maybe Volume 2 will be the one.

Aidan Curran

 To buy a new or (very reasonably priced) 2nd hand copy of this album on Amazon just click here.

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Groan. Let us never speak about rugby again (at least until France v Ireland at the Stade de France next spring).

It's Fashion Week here in Paris. Now, although your blogger cuts a suave and well-tailored figure, it's hardly an event to get us excited on the scale of, say, a month-long sports tournament. But then again, neither are we enthusiastic about the imminent release by everyone's favourite over-rated and cantankerously obscure band.

Still, we know that the CLUAS readership are a fashionable bunch, and they expect their Foreign Correspondent (Paris) to report on the rag-and-bone fest going on all around him.

So, having swanned around the centre of Paris this morning, here's what your F.C. (P.) can EXCLUSIVELY report:

• Number of fashion shows attended: zero
• Number of celebs spotted: zero
• Weather: bucketing down
• Number of tall, glamorous models hailing taxis in the middle of the street: loads
• Number of soaked and overweight Irish fans who succeeded in getting a cab this morning: zero
• Origin of metro-seeking rugby-supporting compatriot at Place Saint Michel who (sl-ow-ly) complimented your blogger on "speaking English very well": Cork
• Sartorial event, focus of much admiration on the metro line 1 eastwards (10:15 a.m.): your blogger's cord flares
• Use of 'admiration' in preceding sentence: ironic

This whole fashion show hullabaloo reminds us of Carla Bruni, the Italian-born supermodel who is now forging a new career as a popstar in France.

Her two albums of quiet, acoustic ballads have been big sellers in France and beyond. This year's bland 'No Promises' had her crooning poems by the likes of W.B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosetti and W.H. Auden.

However, her first record, 'Quelqu'un M'a Dit', was a much better album - a collection of mellow, dreamy folk-pop (in the style of some of Françoise Hardy's early '70s songs) that the CLUAS reviewer at the time called a 'subtle and charismatic record'. Here's the title track:

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Review Snapshot: He may be a shining light in an overcrowded Irish singer-songwriter scene, but this album finds Josh Ritter failing to take the leap forward that his fans might have hoped for. Though...

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Review Snapshot: This melodically ambitious record from former anti-folker shows plenty of scope in relation to the presentation of the songs, yet is let down by repetition of production techniques. D...

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Isn't it quite outstanding news? A new Radiohead album, called In Rainbows, due out in 10 days in digital format... and it's free! Or extremely expensive. It's up to you, faithful music lover.  If a digital download doesn't float your boat, you can fork out 40 quid for a hardbook package with 2 CDs and a Vinyl album too and wait until early December for delivery.

Just bizarre! The Guardian have, conveniently, listed the known tunes with some quite dubious YouTube links.

1. 15 Step

2. Bodysnatchers

3. Nude

4. Weird Fishes/Arpegii

5. All I Need

6. Faust Arp

7. Reckoner

8. House of Cards

9. Jigsaw Falling Into Place

10. Videotape

So how much will you lot all fork out for the digital release?

I won't pay full price on the general principle that MP3s are an inferior product. But for the sheer audacity of this idea (and the fact that it might influence some of the more far-sighted record companies), I'm willing to stump up a few euros. Check out the site - it's lovely.

Isn't it great to be just bloody excited about music again?!

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September 29th marked the six month anniversary of the launch of the Irish Times blog section. The first of their blogs to go live was Jim Carroll's On The Record (the first entry of which was posted on March 29th). The Present Tense, Pricewatch and Correspondant blogs soon followed, although the latter of these was only active until shortly after the General Election.

Thankfully, from the off, the decision was taken to not lock the blogs up behind the 'Premium content' wall that cuts off most of the Irish Times website. If they had been, the blogs certainly would not have seen the success nor secured the extensive visibility they have in the Irish blogosphere. On the Record in particular has made its mark as a must visit blog for anyone in Ireland with a healthy interest in the music scene and industry.

The success of these blogs however is not just reflected in the number and quality of informative blog entries (and it must be said equally informative comments left on the blogs) but also in the raw numbers of links the blogs have attracted in this short space of time. When it comes to the interweb it is the links your site (or blog) manages to attract from others that plays a vital role in making or breaking your site. So how can you measure the number of links a site (or an individual page on a site) has received? Yahoo's "Site Explorer" tool is widely accepted by those with an interest in such matters as being the most accurate tool to do so. At the time of writing this tool throws up the following number of links from other websites ("Inlinks") that each Irish Times blog has attracted:

• 38,965 inlinks for 'On the record' (Jim Carroll) 
• 35,309 inlinks for 'Present tense' (Shane Hegarty)
• 1,209 inlinks for 'Pricewatch' (Conor Pope) 
• 824 inlinks for 'Correspondent' (Mark Hennessy)

This adds up to total of 73,307 inlinks, an impressive enough figure on its own. But even more so when you consider that, over its 8 or so year life, the entire Ireland.com website has managed to attract a total of 525,745 inlinks. In a nutshell the blogs, in the space of six months, now attract over 14% of all links to Ireland.com.

All this new 'link love' is going to have a consequence for the blogs, and for the other freely accessible, non-premium parts of the site. I'm over-simplifying here but, in effect, thanks to this 'link love' pages on these blogs can expect to rank more highly on search engines for relevant key word searches than many other similar pages recieving less link love. In addition the 'link love' will be seen by the search engines to 'leak' to other (non-premium parts) of the Ireland.com site raising the potential of those pages to rank more highly in search engine result pages.

The consequence of this? Well for one, an increase in the number of visits referred to Ireland.com by the search engines. I'll stick my head out a bit and venture that the Ireland.com backroom geek team - if they have their eye on the ball - is already seeing this happen. And in 2007 more visits from the search engines mean you can serve up more advertisements, meaning more moolah to be made.

It is this exact cycle that recently made the NY Times realise that charging for access to certain parts of their website meant they were actually losing money. Big time. Hence their decision to drop their premium pay-to-read sections. Their entire site – including their archives – is now totally now free to browse.

Ireland.com however seems to be going in the other direction. They don't just continue to insist you pay to access the vast majority of articles (EUR 79 a year to access the last 10 years of articles), but they have also gone and introduced a new 'Premium Plus' subscription (for a whopping EUR 395 a year) to access their full archive dating back to 1859.

Asking your readers to pay to access content is soooo 2001. It is simply no longer a growth industry. The growth curve now lies with online advertising which is becoming (if it is not already) the primary source of potential revenues for non e-commerce websites. And if you choose to lock up 99% of your content behind pay-walls (as Ireland.com do) you are also making an active choice to restrict your ability to pull in the (growing) online advertising revenues out there.

My guess is that in recent years Ireland.com was not seeing much growth in their basic subscription revenues and they did the opposite of what they should have - they introduced yet another premium service (the 359 euro a year 'Premium Plus' product) in the hope it would grow their income and get them out of the loss making situation they are in (EUR 180,000 loss in 2006). Indeed publicly available tools for measuring the popularity of websites (such as Alexa.com or Compete) show that over the last 12 months the full Ireland.com site (see Alexa data in the first graph, Compete.com data in second graph below) has not been a period of explosive growth. The success of the blogs has itself not been enough to reverse the tide (yes, yes, I am fully aware that these tools are not perfectly accurate, but for the purposes of this discussion they, together, can be taken as a strong indication of traffic trends).

Thankfully for Ireland.com they also decided to try out a bit of blogging outside of their 'pay wall'. In doing so they managed - as we have seen - to attract a huge number of links, not just attracting a new set of visitors to the blogs but also, I am sure, increasing the ranking of of Ireland.com pages (but only the 1 or so % of pages that are 'non-premium') in search engine result pages. In the right hands this translates into potentially very serious increased revenues. Imagine however the links (i.e. traffic, hence ad revenue) they could generate if all their content - not just 1% - was free to access?

Bottom line? Ireland.com has more to benefit by going subscription-free than it does hiding behind a pay wall. My guess? The wall will be dismantled within 6 months. Hopefully Hotpress.com will also see the light and drop their insistence on paying to access hotpress.com content.

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