It sure is funny to see a gaffe this big amplified tenfold on a monstrous professional tour…Van Halen of course have finally, after what can only be described as a never ending ego retard soap opera, sort of re-united with David Lee Roth back at the helm as front buffoon. There is no denying he once was a great showman and now seems to have lost most of his reality faculties, HOWEVER it isn’t old Diamond Dave who is wreaking havoc on this crappy song (Van Halen has some kick ass tunes, this is not one of them, just because it won the popularity contest)…Apparently, uh VERY apparently, the synths are about a half step out of tune from Eddie’s guitar…just close your eyes sit back take a deep breathe and listen…It’s pure magic, and you have to give him props for not bothering to try and fix it, he just plows on through it like a trooper.

So Radiohead has claimed they won’t release results on the sales figures for In Rainbows, I’m not sure why not really but whatever, there are some pretty good guesses being floated and it sure looks good. Here is a quote from the Seminal-

According to a source close to the band, In Rainbows has “sold” approximately 1.2 million copies as of October 12th. In comparison, that’s more albums sold in the first week than Radioheads’ last three releases combined. According to an Internet poll of 3,000 people, the average price paid for In Rainbows was $8. If these numbers are accurate, Radiohead has made close to $10 million in one week on this album alone. Read More…

So…they potentially made 6-10 million from sales! That sure sounds good, of course I have no idea how much they make from their label, but I’ll take those figures to the bank anyday. There have been a lot of estimates about the album being downloaded concurrently on Bittorrent, and many have speculated on the reasons for this. My personal experience was that the user experience on the official Radiohead site was HORRIBLE, and I’ll bet they could have doubled their sales if they had evaluated that further. The site was hit hard and was slow as slow can be, and once I found the actual link to pay and figured out what to do the form kept resetting to a value of 0 every time i tried to enter a number (I was going to pay…really, I don’t even like Radiohead much, I just love that they are doing this) and would not let me proceed…I ended up getting the album from a friend who was able to get through to the site, I liked it, and have since been back to fork over some dough. The whole conversion from pounds to dollars thing was poorly handled as well, it’s really not a stretch for that to all be fully automated. I’d call this experiment a success, and say, there were things to be learned, hopefully they will address the UI a bit and make sure to have a scalable solution for the bandwidth to handle the interest next time.

Radiohead- Official Website (considerably faster now)