Free Album Downloads: Its what all the kids are doing

As a longstanding, unabashed fan of Prince -- I've gotten a lot of entertainment out of reading about this whole Coachella "Creep" controversy thing that's cropped up lately where (if you didn't know) Prince covered the famous Radiohead song as part of his closing set at the California music festival, apparently with the original band's blessings -- a version that was of course recorded immediately on video by scores of cell phones and digital cameras to be transferred (as all things are these days) to YouTube for the rest of us who were not able to make it to the show to enjoy.

Links to the footage immediately began to get forwarded to anyone and everyone who might care (I got mine in the form of a message from my Grammy-award winning MySpace "friend," Meshell Ndegeocello, who is also a long longstanding, unabashed fan of the purple one). Her gushing, fanboy description of the clip (even in a message to the anonymous scads of MySpacers she broadcast the link to) is a plain reminder that those of us who love what the guy does will clamor over almost anything he does, mainly because the guy is so effing particular about album release dates and people posting unauthorized versions of his stuff on the web -- even to the point where Ndegeocello tagged her email with "Watch it quick before his lawyers rip them down."

And as expected, Prince and his legal team have been busy as of late pulling and blocking videos of his Coachella Radiohead performance in the name of copyright infringement or whatever.

Now word comes out that the members of Radiohead are urging Prince to chill out and leave the footage up. Radiohead, of course is the group considered to be well on the other side of this spectrum, gaining indie cred and infamy for their open embracing of the Internet file and video sharing culture. Radiohead, as you might recall made huge waves when they "gave away" free copies of their latest album on their website (actually they had a deal where you could name your own price for the album -- it's just that a lot of people named NOTHING).

This is not really new territory for Radiohead, who used to "leak" their own albums prior to releasing them back in the day -- but the practice has sort of caught on of late, and reports of "free albums" have been surfacing all over the musical spectrum, from bands like Nine Inch Nails and The Wu Tang Clan.

..Or this one.