After the overwhelming response to the Nude Remix Project, Radiohead are giving fans the opportunity to remix “Reckoner”, another track from the band’s latest album “In Rainbows”.
To make remixing easy, the separate parts from the song will be available to purchase on iTunes. The parts available are bass, lead vocal, backing vocals, guitars, piano/strings and drums. All six parts will be available to buy for the price of a single track. Fans can mix them in any way they like, either by adding their own beats and instrumentation, or just remixing the original parts.
Fans who purchase the parts from iTunes during the first two weeks they’re available, will be sent an access code to a GarageBand file ready to open in GarageBand or Logic. However, you don’t need GarageBand to do a remix, the parts are available in the DRM-free iTunes Plus format and compatible with several music software platforms.
Finished mixes can be uploaded to radioheadremix.com where the public will listen and vote for their favourite. Fans can also create a widget allowing votes from their own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be counted as ‘mix votes’.
Is anyone else not into these Radiohead remix projects? Personally I find them overwhelming. I really liked In Rainbows, and Reckoner is one of my favourite tracks from it. I actually find that these mass remix projects totally undermine the original beauty of the track.
I just got an email from their marketing campaign boasting that for the last remix their stats were:
“Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304″
This doesn’t impress me. “Number of mixes: 2,252″!
2,252 versions of the same song. Even after listening to four versions of the current Reckoner remix contest I’m totally bored of the song. If anything these contest are lessening my enjoyment of the original. Which is a bad thing.
I’m also really not impressed by their move to charge you to download the remix ‘stems’ (just call them parts surely?). Shrewd move.
What does anyone else think?
I agree with the stems bit. I’ve always know it as parts.
As for the competitions I think their great! I know this sort of thing produces tons of mediocre remixes that can dilute the original but if it didn’t happen then we wouldn’t get to hear the Holy Fuck remix of ‘Nude’ which was stunning.
Give it time and let the blogs listen for the good ones then just check out the cream of the crop for your favourite. Or you could stay tuned to Radio Magnetic for the best ones. So far favourite has to be the Flying Lotus remix.