Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows was released on download earlier this week to great anticipation from fans. Their first release since 2003, In Rainbows is only available directly from the Radiohead website, but in a ground-breaking move, fans get to choose how much they pay for the music – anything from the 45p processing fee upwards! NME has an interesting article showing how much fans have decided to pay and the average seems to be around £5.

However since the release there’s been a huge backlash around the internet due to the compression of the download files. Each track is encoded in DRM Free 160kbps MP3 which is generally fine for listening to on MP3 players, but pretty poor for decent systems as it loses all the intricacies and detail of the music. It now appears that the low quality download is only a promotion for the full high-quality CD album to be released next year. This has angered a lot of fans who feel duped into buying this inferior version even though they set the price they paid:

First and foremost, all of Radiohead’s previous albums were already available as MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits per second…

Second, most took issue with when Radiohead chose to announce that In Rainbows would be available at 160 kbps — after the majority of their fans had already paid for the download.

I’ve yet to download it myself. The 160MP3 will be fine for my macbook, but not for my home stereo or headphones. I think I’ll probably pay a smaller amount for the download and if I really enjoy the album then I’ll but the full physical copy when released to appreciate the detail.