In my inbox just now:

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IN RAINBOWS. THIS IS AN UPDATE.

YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT TOMORROW MORNING (UK TIME). THIS WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.

HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:

THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.

In Rainbows is, of course, the new Radiohead album. I am beside myself with excitement about this. For me, any new Radiohead album is cause for rejoicing; but this one comes with an added bonus: this is the first album that Radiohead has released outside of a record contract. Because of this, they can offer the music as a DRM-free download under the "it's up to you" pricing scheme. This is exciting in itself; In Rainbows is a valuable opportunity to find out what major-label music is like without the major labels.

I thought a lot about what price to pay for this album. I believe records are overpriced, because I believe that the services record companies offer to musicians are overvalued and encourage the production of crappy music. I think artists are not compensated enough for their work. And I've always talked about how great it would be if there was a way to send money directly to the artist.

I certainly wasn't going to pay the minimum price (1p) - I'd find that pretty insulting as an artist, I think; and besides, that would just give the record companies cause to shout about what would happen if everyone cut them out of the process.

I thought about paying what I think records ought to cost - say, roughly about $10 (with a significantly larger percentage going to the artists). That would be fair, certainly - Radiohead, after all, would see nearly all of that, instead of the minuscule cut they'd get from a label album.

But In Rainbows is more than just the music. It is, as I've said, an opportunity to try something new in music production and distribution. Everyone knows the old system can't sustain itself. The Internet has empowered the artist again - it's the biggest distribution and marketing network ever created, and you don't have to pay to play. It is entirely conceivable, these days, that a determined artist could go from unknown, to cult favorite, to international superstar, entirely without the involvement of record companies. It hasn't happened yet, not really, but it will; and it is going to take bold moves by artists like Radiohead, Prince, and Nine Inch Nails to pave the way. They can afford to drop their contracts and experiment with alternatives, and once we figure out what works, it's going to become a lot easier to get noticed on the Internet.

I want Radiohead's grand experiment to be successful, and I want people to take notice. I don't want it to make as much money as a label album; I want it to make more. And I want to express my appreciation to Radiohead for doing this.

So I'm proud to say that I paid £20, or just over $40, for In Rainbows. It's already worth every penny to me, and I don't even have the record yet. Tomorrow morning, when I stumble out of bed and start downloading it, is going to be the start of a new era in the music business. And I'm beside myself with excitement.

Why are there no services where you can pay to download a movie, burn it to DVD, and watch it on your TV? Ars Technica has a rundown of the problem. It seems that since there is no end-user license for CSS (DVD's copy-protection system), there's no way to legally allow end users to burn CSS-protected DVDs. Without protected DVDs, the movie studios won't buy into any scheme, for fear of people using the system for piracy.

I'm shaking my head as I write this. How ironic that CSS, a copy-protection system, is actually preventing copy-protection measures from being put into place. How ironic that CSS has been trivially circumventable for years, and that anyone who can put a DVD in a drive with the right side up can rip a movie.

These are the kinds of tangles you get into when you become a purveyor of DRM. Eventually, it's going to trip you up somewhere - content that protects itself and limits its own usage is by definition not portable, and DRM schemes can't keep up with people's ideas about how content can be consumed. And you lock yourself in to an ever-escalating battle to create the next generation of "uncrackable" DRM, which is in turn cracked in days, weeks, or months.

How sad that so much mental energy is spent on this dead-end technology. Once a DRM scheme is broken, it may as well not be there at all - it doesn't stop the real, financially damaging commercial piracy, and it doesn't stop the casual pirate either. All it does is artificially limit what the average consumer can do with "their own" content.

When you discover that your $1000 iTunes library won't play on the new shiny brown Zune you bought, you get frustrated. You haven't done anything wrong - you bought the music fair and square. So maybe you return the Zune to the store. Maybe you give up. And maybe, just maybe, you turn to piracy. And that's ironic.