More of the same

Radiohead recently set up radioheadremix.com for listeners to remix their latest single, Nude. Not an April Fool's joke, as some readers believed. The thing about radioheadremix.com is that you have to buy each of the five multitrack components through iTunes if you want to remix it. This is a far cry from remix.nin.com, where Reznor not only lets you post anything NIN-related (so long as it doesn't infringe on the copyright of other artists), but he has provided (or will provide) multitracks for all of his recent music (in a variety of formats) and moreover has used the remix site to provide instrumental versions of all the NIN catalogue of vocal music. You don't have to pay a dime to use remix.nin.com, where you can get a good choice of Year Zero, Ghosts, and even a few Niggy Tardust multitracks. So you can vote for your favourite Nude remixes—so what? Like this article says:

What's sort of unclear is what actually happens to remixers who get the most votes. According to iTunes' New Music Tuesday e-mail, "Select mixes will be made available on iTunes later this year." Uh, OK. Then what? Do the creators get a portion of the sales revenue? A "thank you" e-mail from Thom Yorke and Co.? The glory of saying, "You love me! You really love me!"? Or perhaps some American Apparel back-warmer emblazoned with "I Won a Radiohead Remix Contest and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt."

People have been rating and commenting remixes on remix.nin.com since its inception; it at least has a community feel. Why does Radiohead take every good NIN idea and turn it into some commercialized contest? Reznor is revolutionizing music in making it an artist-community conversation; while Radiohead has the appearance of doing the same thing, it doesn't seem to me that they have that same intent.