MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.

If this particular trend line continues to move upward, it would suggest that the site's music-centric gamble was a wise one. It would certainly make sense, given the site's history. When MySpace first came onto the scene in 2003, it was used by independent musicians to share music and connect with fans, who quickly flocked to the site. By 2008, the site attracted nearly 80 million unique visitors per month and was considered the preeminent social networking service.

Specific Media's new strategy aims to capitalize on MySpace's roots while building new features and functionality to help better reposition the site as a music hub. Even as the site's popularity has declined among the general population, it continued to be big among bands and other musicians.

Over the years, the site has amassed a library of music containing over 42 million tracks, which positions it quite competitively with the likes of Rdio and Spotify, even if MySpace's content leans heavily toward unsigned and independent artists.

Is this enough to turn things around for MySpace? The site won't return to being the social behemoth it was before the rise of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. By more aggressively carving out this niche, its new owners could at least allow the site to grow and build a viable, more focused business.

Last week, rock veteran Neil Young chimed in with his assertion that the digital music files we listen to today are of much lower quality than the original recordings. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference, he said that the technology now exists to deliver much higher-quality audio to music fans, and that he had even talked to Steve Jobs about a possible solution.

How Serious is the Problem? ... And How to Fix It?

Exactly how bad is this problem? By Young's estimation, what we hear in most files today is "only 5% of the data of the original recording". That may be a slight exaggeration, depending on how the files are encoded. Certainly, lower bit rate files (such as 128kbps MP3s) have a noticeably degraded quality to them, compared to a CD. But most sources have graduated to higher quality files now that broadband speeds allow for it. A standard track on iTunes is a 256kbps AAC file and premium Spotify subscribers can listen to many songs at 320kbps, which is about 22% of a CD track's bit rate.

When it comes to streaming audio on mobile devices, the quality buck pretty much stops at whatever the data connection can handle. On 3G networks, streaming CD-quality audio just isn't feasible. Over a good WiFi connection, things look a little more promising, but there are still limitations if the user experience is to be preserved.

Young: We Need an iPod For Audiophiles

So what does Young propose as a solution? From the sound of it, he'd like to see a sort of mega-iPod with more disk space and internal guts optimized to playback massive files. Such a device wouldn't be designed to include one's entire library, but rather only a selection of audiophile-quality albums. Presumably, it would tend to be used with superior quality earphones or speakers, which is another important factor in the quality of what we hear.

Even if a device akin to what Young describes were produced and sold, how big of a market would there be for it? The quality of the audio found on sources like iTunes, Spotify, MOG, Amazon and Google Music is apparently good enough to convince millions of people to pay for access to it. At the end of the day, most of the content on the pay music services is certainly good enough. Musicians and audiophiles can pick up on the degradations in quality, but for the average listener, it's pretty subtle. The device that Young describes would have to be marketed toward the audiophiles for whom 320kbps simply won't cut it.

Last week wasn't the first time Young has criticized the state of digital music. Some may dismiss his stance as nothing more than a grumpy, old-school perspective, as though he's just an old guy that doesn't get the new-fangled ways of the Web and digital media. This isn't the case. Young may be a veteran of the music industry, but he's well aware of what's changed about it and why. During the same interview in which he slammed MP3's, he said that "piracy is the new radio" and encouraged new artists to forgo record labels in favor of doing it themselves.

There's Nothing Wrong With Analog

As Young pointed out, Steve Jobs may have been a digital music pioneer, but "when he went home, he listened to vinyl." This is true not only of the generation that grew up on LPs, but also of a growing number of younger music fans today. Vinyl sales have been surging for the last few years, with 2011 seeing a 39% increase in sales over the previous year. Digital music sales grew last year too, but by considerably less.

For music fans with the deepest concern for audio quality, it seems analog is increasingly the way to go. That's okay. We can have our digital revolution in music and still fall back on analog formats. Just like with books, the value offered by digital music is primarily about volume, convenience and ease of production and distribution. And just like sitting down with a good, paper-bound book, putting on a vinyl record is more about quality and the overall experience.

Digital and Analog Can Coexist Peacefully

Digital and analog don't need to be at war with one another. What many labels and artists are doing now is sell records on vinyl and include a coupon for a free, high-quality digital download in the record's sleeve. That allows people to enjoy the album as it was intended and also throw it onto their iPod or smartphone for listening on the go.

It's also possible to go the high-quality route in a digital-only format. When The Beatles' catalogue was remastered and reissued in 2009, the material was released on CD and, for the first time, via iTunes. For diehard fans who wanted more than what iTunes could offer, they also sold an apple-shaped (no, not that Apple) thumb drive containing every album in superior quality, lossless FLAC format, as well as as 320kbps MP3s.

However things may evolve, it's evident that digital music has brought us great value, but it's done so at a cost, namely quality. This may not be perceived as a problem by every consumer, but for those who take the craft of creating and recording music most seriously, it's one well worth solving. Whether it's solved through a hybrid of analog and digital music consumption or through some new, high-capacity device for playing back lossless digital audio, the challenge isn't an insurmountable one.

Vinyl sales chart courtesy of Digital Music News.

Apparently, iTunes Match has been inadvertently replacing certain tracks with the "clean" version of the same song, Cult of Mac reported.

It looks like what's happening here is the system is misreading metadata for certain tracks and cross-referencing with radio-friendly edits of the same song. At the very least, this has happened with four hip hop tracks as reported by Cult of Mac.

To some, this may smack of the nothing-dirty-please, prim-and-proper censorship for which Apple has gained a reputation in the iTunes App Store. More likely than not, it's just a bug. The company may not want filthy porno-filled apps populating its App Store, but that's quite different from allowing people to listen to a profanity-laden Jay-Z song that they purchased (or otherwise) acquired on their own accord.

Apple has acknowledged that this is an issue and is reportedly working on a fix.

The new player first went into beta in November, giving those curious enough an opportunity to experiment with it. Now that the bugs have been ironed out and a few new features added, the widget is ready for prime time.

A big part of that growth, cofounder Alex Liung told us, is the company's mobile strategy. It has highly functional native apps for iOS and Android, but the browser-based Web is another story. When users try to play back embedded SoundCloud clips on an iPad or iPhone, the old player simply wouldn't work, like all the other Flash embeds scattered across the Web.

HTML5: A Necessary Move

For this reason, the conversion to an HTML5 embeddable player is a necessity for a service like SoundCloud if it expects to maximize its reach across the Web and keep growing. Flash will presumably never be supported on iOS devices iPads and iPhones, a fact that wouldn't matter so much if Apple didn't keep selling millions upon millions of them. Just last quarter, over 15 million iPads and 37 million iPhones landed in the hands of consumers, and this revolution in personal computing is still well underway. In November, Adobe announced that it would suspend development of the mobile version of Flash, apparently accepting that open standards like HTML5 and related technologies could do most of what Flash was capable of it.

It's not just cross-device compatibility that makes ditching Flash a good idea. HTML5 is also less resource-intensive when playing back audio, and should exhibit better performance.

While testing the new player out, the SoundCloud team discovered a few other advantages as well. Apparently, the appearance of the revised player made users twice as likely to hit the "play" button. From there, they were eight times more likely to share a given track with others.

Now that it's coming out of beta, the new player now supports saving any sound to one's "likes" and making comments in-line on the waveform, which was one of more the powerful features of the original Flash player.

Digital music only continues to grow and mature, as streaming services explode, Internet radio companies go public and developers begin using the power of open APIs to mash up sounds and services. SoundCloud alone saw 231% growth last year, while Twitter saw a 104% increase in music-related activity.

What's interesting, though, is how the Web is paving the way for unsigned, independent artists to reach levels of popularity that rival major label acts. This is especially true on SoundCloud, where unsigned artists flock to upload their recordings. But even across the larger Web, three unsigned artists broke into Next Big Sound's "Social 50" list, which chronicles, the 50 biggest artists across all of the social and music sites that they track.

These numbers, while impressive, should be taken with a grain of salt. Next Big Sound has gone to great lengths to pull data from sources like YouTube, Rdio, Last.fm, Pandora, SoundCloud and several others. One service missing from their list is Spotify, which just launched in the U.S. this past summer and has seen enormous growth since then. Still, it looks like they're using a pretty hefty sample of online music data to draw their conclusions. You can take a closer look at their methodology. if you're curious.

The Internet and mobile technology are beginning to have an equally significant impact on the creation of music itself. Extremely powerful recording, DJing and sequencing software is making its way from laptops to tablets and smartphones, for example. Now, the way people learn to play music in the first place is changing as well.

These days, instead of traveling across town to attend music lessons, many people are using tools like Skype to learn from a distance, just as they can do things like attend meetings and take academic courses regardless of their physical location. The new model allows for more flexible learning and in many cases improves the regularity of lessons since it avoids things like traffic jams and bad weather.

Even if one doesn't get one-on-one lessons via Skype, the Web is loaded with music education resources for all skill levels. When a few friends and I started a band last year, I decided to brush up some more advanced drumming techniques, since it had been a few years since I last played. Much like Lynda.com and Tuts+offer video tutorials for software and coding, there a number of sites out there who do the same for drummers and other musicians. I found one in particular that published a free video podcast, enabling me to download the lessons to my phone or iPad and bring a virtual teacher down into the basement with me.

Online music lessons range from having the structure of a college course to being as loose and on-your-own-time as a series of YouTube searches. On YouTube, the quality of the material may vary, but there are quite a few dedicated sites with legitimate, high-quality video lessons available, sometimes for free.

For those who are especially serious and have the money to spend, the Berklee College of Music offers online-only courses and certifications through a website called BerkleeMusic. The courses don't come cheap, but enrolling and paying for them is a straight-forward, Web-based process.

Learning Music Goes Mobile

The explosion of smartphones and tablets has impacted countless aspects of daily life for millions of people, and budding musicians are no exception. Not only can you watch video tutorials on your iPad or Android phone, but there's a growing selection of educational apps that allow for casual learning from any location.

Some of the numerous mini-piano and keyboard apps for the iOS and Android, for example, come with built-in guides to musical notation, with some of them going into more depth about music theory. Other apps drill down further into music theory, such as Wolfram Alpha's Music Theory Course Assistant app for iOS.

There's a wide selection of instrument-specific learning apps for iOS alone, such as GuitarLab and Gibson Learn and Master Guitar or Piano Tutor and Virtuoso Piano.

Like with any learning process, the effectiveness of mobile apps and Web tutorials like these will depend somewhat on one's approach and level of motivation. Ultimately, in-person music lessons may still work best for some. There will likely always be a place for one-on-one, in-the-flesh education, but these new tools and methods open things up to a wider group of people with virtually no restrictions on time and place.

Facebook must have foreseen this problem because today it announced yet another way to listen to music through your account. The catch here is that you're actually listening with your friends rather than voyeuristically peering into their playlists and, unbeknownst to them, clicking on their songs.

This new Facebook music feature works through the private chat sidebar, not the news feed. Log on and you'll be able to see what your friend are listening to, which is indicated by a music note. Any chat friends who are listening to music will automatically display a "Listen With" button. Click it and you'll start listening, too.

The catch here is that you'll only actually listen with people if others randomly click on the song. Then a group chat will pop up. From there, one of your friends can start playing DJ, selecting the songs that the whole group listens to.

With Spotify integration in the news ticker, you see a music note; if you hover over it and click, you can listen to the same song or artist that your friend is listening to, but you're not actually listening with them.

The Facebook "Listen With" feature begins rolling out today.

The state of online music sales for independent artists may not be as abysmal at it feels though, according to some data recently shared by Bandcamp. The artist promotion and e-commerce site found that some of their paid music downloads were being initiated by users who had searched explicitly for pirated content.

Bandcamp didn't offer hard, aggregate data about how often this is happening, so it's largely anecdotal evidence. Still, it appears to bolster the argument that if digital content is made easily available, many of those who want it most will pay for it. It's a notion recently tested by comedian Louis C.K., and so far the results look very positive for artists and content creators.

C.K., just like independent artists on Bandcamp, did not thwart piracy all together. That's not the point. Illegal downloads still take place all day long, and probably always will as long as the Internet is intact. But what's emerging lately are signs that many will in fact pay for content online, if it's easy and convenient to do so. An increase in that tendency, combined with new and innovative ways of monetizing one's work, may well represent the future of some creative industries, or could at least infuse them with a host of new self-sustained talent.

Bandcamp is a relatively new, if quickly emerging, force in the music industry, and it's one that's geared toward independent musicians. So you may want to take its story with a grain of salt. It's entirely possible that people are no less inclined to illegally download blockbuster albums from major label acts. It may just be harder for some to feel guilty about it.

Even so, the digital future of music is still very much emerging and these early signs of economic viability should serve as some encouragement for those looking to be a part of it.

Berlin based music and audio sharing network SoundCloud has raised a reported $50m more venture capital from the super prestigious Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe reported today. The company had raised about $16m in two previous rounds. If you're not familiar with SoundCloud, now is a good time to learn about the site. It's a vibrant and innovative community, about to either blow up huge or go down in flames with the change that comes from a large and high-priced investment like this.

Meeker's 2011 presentation on the state of the internet addressed a trend of companies growing strong in one small market and then exploding out onto the global stage; she provided 4 examples of that trend and SoundCloud was the only one of the four not yet a Kleiner portfolio company. (Waze, Shazam and Spotify were the others.) Meeker also mentioned SoundCloud in discussing her belief that sound is going to be a next major area of innovation, eg. Siri, Spotify and SoundCloud.

Meeker loves mobile and while SoundCloud's mobile apps are already good, it will be interesting to see whether and how her leadership inspires further development in global mobile applications.

What SoundCloud Means

SoundCloud is an inspiring community of audio producers and fans, leveraging new technology like widespread smart phones, cheap data storage and transfer, within a great user experience. It's reminiscent of the best things about YouTube in its early days, but it's different.

One good way to get started finding good things on SoundCloud is via the official staff collection of highlights from the site. That's where I found the WildEarthVoices account, whose recordings and favorites from other accounts are all about ambient sound recordings from nature. SoundCloud has all kinds of sounds on it though; from podcasts to thunderstorms to electronic music, music made electronically and music you might call electronica. (There's a lot of electronic music on SoundCloud.)

Not all of SoundCloud's experiments work out either, SoundCloudLabs was an effort to highlight cutting edge apps that seems to have lost steam over the past Summer.

None the less, the SoundCloud community appears to be small but growing fast. Traffic analyst firm Compete reports 2.3 million unique visitors per month, up nearly 2X year over year. SoundCloud self-reported 5 million registered users in June. It grew to 9 million as 2011 drew to a close. Pandora, for context, has 80 million registered users.

The company only added web and iOS one-click recording at the end of 2010. The acclaimed iPad app came out in October. The website still doesn't offer RSS feeds of published files.

There's something really exciting about checking the Activity stream on the SoundCloud iOS app and finding something new, then clicking through to listen with other people to music that was just posted.

SoundCloud was founded five years ago this month by CTO Eric Wahlforss, who has degrees in Philosophy, Industrial Economics, Computer Science and Business Administration and CEO Alexander Ljung, who studied marketing and Human Computer Interaction. Both are Swedish. ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus did an in-depth interview with Ljung about the company's prospects this October.

From inline commenting to smooth integration with 3rd party social networks, the user experience at SoundCloud is fun. Discovery can be a little challenging but exploration is easy. It would be nice if SoundCloud would sync with my Scrobbled musical history at Last.fm and offer me immediate personal recommendations.

AnnoySPASMcrack by ellefläädt

The service hosts up to 120 minutes of audio for free, then offers annual subscriptions for more storage, advanced analytics and promotional materials priced at between €29 ($37) per year through €59 ($76) per month for the unlimited pro plus package.

The site offers a huge quantity of Creative Commons licensed audio and loves to interview the users of that and other content.

The SoundCloud API supports an app gallery with more than 250 apps listed and probably an even larger array of independent projects, from things like urban music catalogue CitySounds.fm to the collaborative mashup art project Instagrambient.

SoundCloud feels like the kind of creative place that the Internet was meant to be. For that to gain a big infusion of cash and the support of some of the world's leading tech investors will hopefully mean more of the same and even better for the SoundCloud community.

When it comes to choosing which option to go for, the most you can do is take each service for a spin, run a couple searches for stuff you like and see what comes up. You can get a general feeling of which one's a better fit and go with your gut, but wouldn't some hard data be nice?

The results show Rdio coming out on top by a number of measures, despite the fact that Spotify is known to have a bigger selection overall. Several respected artists were only availble on Rdio, including Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Queen and Thelonius Monk. Both services have a ton of exclusive albums, but only Rdio can boast Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon or London Calling by The Clash.

Spotify (at 4.8%) had slightly fewer exclusive albums than Rdio, on which 6.8% of the albums were available exclusively. Nine of the 100 most popular albums were only on Rdio, while only one of them was exclusive to Spotify.

To be fair, Rate Your Music is probably not the most authoritative source of what's popular. A more complex analysis might mash together datasets from Billboard, Last.fm and, if possible, Amazon user reviews to come up with a more comprehensive list of popular albums.

Not included in the study were services like Grooveshark and MOG, the latter of which does not make an API available to developers.

One such tool, StageIt, is hoping to put an innovative spin on live performances by bringing them online.

The service recently landed an investment from Sean Parker, who's track record in the digital music space includes co-founding Napster and being an eager investor in Spotify. He is perhaps most well known for being the founding president of Facebook, which made its own foray into the music space this year.

StageIt is in no way going to replace concerts at live venues, but the service could enable smaller artists to promote themselves in ways not previously possible. Not every market has a music scene with legitimate venues, and in urban markets where music is thriving, not every unsigned artist can get on a bill right away. Something like this could provide a risk-free way to build up an audience online or at least play for fans who might not live near where the band is likely to play in person.

To really take off with users, StageIt is going to need to attract the attention of bigger artists, or at least up-and-coming musicians with especially substantial followings.

The idea isn't too far off form the online group listening craze we've seen develop this year. If services like Turntable.fm and Chill can get people to watch a DJ set or video together on the Internet, who's to say people won't attend a virtual concert as well?

Lead photo by givikat

As vilified as file-sharing has historically been, the practice has been gaining favor in somewhat unexpected places lately. The Songwriter's Association of Canada recently threw its support behind the idea of legalizing file-sharing and finding ways to monetize the practice, rather than cracking down on it through legal means.

"Music file-sharing is a vibrant, open, global distribution system for music of all kinds, and presents a tremendous opportunity to both creators and rights-holders," the organization stated in a proposal. "Additionally, once a fair and reasonable monetization system is in place, all stakeholders including consumers and Internet service providers will benefit substantially."

The news comes shortly after the Swiss government released a report saying that illegal file-sharing isn't a big enough problem to justify cracking down on it as harshly as is being proposed in other European countries.

Canadian songwriters are not advocating a stance quite as hands-off as that, but they do think that file-sharing ought be viewed as an opportunity for artists rather than a threat.

Still, there remains the issue of how the Internet is going to ensure that artists are properly compensated. That is still very much being ironed out. It may well be that in the long run, artists don't profit as much as they once did from selling recorded music and instead have to focus their efforts on bringing in revenue through other means. Even through legal and record label-approved means like Spotify, artists have yet to see a significant financial gain from participating.

Host John Battelle spoke with Parker about Napster, Spotify and the future of the music industry, what's wrong with Facebook, and they tiptoed around his mysterious new venture - Airtime - enough to insinuate that it's something like the Spotify of television.

The Next Music Industry

"Spotify is an attempt to finish what I started at Napster," Parker admitted. He said the main trouble with Napster was that they decided to go straight to peer-to-peer without talking to record labels. The peer-to-peer service invented a new and popular way to use the Internet, but the business wasn't world-changing. In fact, at worst, it facilitated something illegal.

Spotify came to the labels with a much more appealing proposition: unlimited free samples of music, frictionless sharing among friends, and a future industry free of the massive overhead of record manufacture and breakage, old-school promotion, and the bottlenecks of regional radio dominance.

There are key parts of the shared love of music that aren't yet available on Spotify. There's no bootlegs, outtakes, live shows, or any sorts of extras, not to mention unsigned artists who want frictionless sharing of their own material. This sort of music sharing is exactly what peer-to-peer networks are best at.

When asked by an audience member, Parker said he'd love to bring that to Spotify. The first step was to get labels on board, and the next step is to convince them that some peer-to-peer should be part of the service. Parker said the idea is to get labels to agree to an arrangement that "if it's not in our system, it's legal."

What's Wrong With Facebook

"What's wrong with Facebook?" Battelle asked Parker. "What don't you like?" He pointed out that Facebook is one of the Web services some people find creepy, feeling that it knows too much about them. "Should people not have this concern?"

Parker weaseled around a little bit, talking about being a Facebook shareholder preventing him from answering that question "satisfactorily." "There's good creepy, and then there's bad creepy," Parker said. "Today's 'creepy' is tomorrow's necessity." He was playing along.

Parker then got on to real answers, but he insisted that Facebook's biggest problem was "not privacy." He thinks it's about better list management.

"Facebook's biggest problem is just the glut of information that power users are overwhelmed with," Parker said. He wondered whether Facebook's problem is that key influencers have moved their efforts to Twitter and Google Plus. On Twitter, the expectations are simpler, and on Google Plus, they're easier to manage. Parker wants "better tools" to overcome that challenge.

The new Smart Lists and Subscribe Button are what Parker called "a step in the right direction." He pointed out that the root of the problem is that three simultaneous things happen when you friend someone on Facebook:

• You publicly assert your friendship
• You subscribe to your new friend's content
• You start broadcasting content to your new friend

Parker says these three things don't necessarily need to be part of one action. Once you've got your friend network organized into some sensible lists, the next step is selectively broadcasting to those lists.

Facebook does allow selective sharing, of course, but "it seems like a lot of work," as Battelle said in response to Parker's answer.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

The social audio-sharing site experienced several hours of intermittent downtime yesterday as SoundCloud's engineers fought off the attack.

Just the day before, the site experienced similar downtime issues, although it isn't clear if that was related to the DDoS attack or not. In terms of a motive for the attack, it was likely just the thrill of bringing down an increasingly popular service, rather than the fulfillment of some ideological agenda as we've seen in the past with Anonymous and Wikileaks-related DDoS attacks.

As of today, the site appears to be loading and operating without issues.

SoundCloud was founded in Berlin in 2008 as a social networking site primarily for musicians to share and promote their music. It has since grown into an audio-sharing platform for amateur and professional musicians alike, as well as podcasts and other audio snippets. In short, it does for audio what YouTube does for video, albeit on a smaller scale.

Once a few prominent blogs began reporting on it, the news spread like wildfire across Twitter and Facebook, where eager fans posted updates about the show and began making plans to attend.

By that point, the Internet-fueled rumor had found its way to the front pages of prominent blogs and music news sites like Gawker, Pitchfork, Gothamist and Huffington Post. Long after media outlets followed up and confirmed that the concert wasn't going to happen, several people on Twitter continued to chatter about it as though it was still on.

So how did this story morph from rumor into front page news so quickly?

Today's real-time, social media-fueled news cycle is partly to blame. So too, it would appear, is at least one spokesman for the Occupy Wall Street protest, who confirmed to reporters that the concert was on. The official website for the demonstration published a post at 12:13pm EST announcing that "Radiohead will play a surprise show for #occupywallstreet today at four in the afternoon." Even hours after the rumor had been denied by the band, the post was not updated or redacted.

As word about the concert began to spread on Twitter, people cited that post as an official confirmation of the show's existence. So too did bloggers, who began publishing the news, further propelling the social Web into a frenzy over the prospect of one of the world's most popular rock bands playing an impromptu gig for an anti-Wall Street protest. Over the course of several hours, Anonymous repeatedly tweeted that the show would be happening, and even offered up a link to a livestream the concert.

By 4:00pm Eastern Time, the concert had not begun, even as some fans speculated that the band had only denied it to prevent a massive crowd from forming. Hours after protestor organizers fanned the flames of the falsehood, a spokesman for the protest finally came forward and said that they'd been "hoaxed", confirming that the whole thing was fake.

If nothing else, the affair served as an illustration of how, despite being revolutionary in some ways, our hyper-rapid, Twitter-fueled news cycle can sometimes get facts wrong and help disseminate them regardless. It's not the first time it's happened, nor will it likely be the last.

Update: The Village Voice has published an email that was sent to the Occupy Wall Street organizers from somebody claiming to be one of Radiohead's managers. This phony email appears to be the spark that ignited yesterday's confusion.

Lead photo by Alterna2.