Remember when Radiohead announced last week that they would be releasing their seventh album, In Rainbows, via their official website and that fans could pay whatever they want (even nothing!) for the music? And then everyone from Madonna to Nine Inch Nails came out of the woodwork and announced they were also leaving their major label home to try unique methods of selling straight to the public?

Well, it turns out Radiohead mighta been scamming us in order to build enough hype around the album for it to get picked up by one of the major label the band appeared to be rallying against.

Bastards!

Turns out, many feel the quality of the downloads the band is offering on its site are…um…crappy. And, even worse, the band's managers made a statement that the you-choose-the-price downloads plan was just a promotional tool for the release of the CD.

Regarding the possible crappiness, on October 9, the day before the album became available for download, fans who ordered the album got an email from the band’s online store saying that "the album [would] come as a 48.4 MB ZIP file containing 10 x 160 [kilobits per second], DRM-free MP3s." This pissed off many fans because 1. all of Radiohead's other albums are available as MP3s encoded at the higher-quality 320 kilobits per second (the highest-possible compression rate in the format, though still not as good sounding as a CD), and 2. no one was told this until AFTER they paid for the service.

Then managers Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge mentioned in a recent interview about how the downloadable version of Rainbows figures into the larger plan of releasing a retail version in 2008.

"In November we have to start with the mass-market plans and get them under way," Hufford said.

"If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn't do what we are doing," Edge added.

In other words, some fans feel the band purposely released a low quality version to fans for this go around, knowing full well they’d be releasing a better quality version in stores later on. This way, fans would have to re-buy it to get the best quality version, and when peer-to-peers got hold of it, they’d be trading inferior copies. All this might not be so bad if the band had been up front about it and described it as a chance for fans to hear the music early, in advance of the high quality CD version. But the impression some got was that this downloadable copy WAS the final, official, best quality version.

So is this kinda sneaky and capitalistic for a band who prides themselves on being a band of the people, a band of outsiders, not influenced by the evil music business, huh? or did everyone jump the gun and assume there wouldn't be a major label version, when the band never actually said that, per say?