There’s a great story about how, when the Beatles completed Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the early hours of April 21st, 1967, they left Abbey Road and took an acetate of the recording to Mama Cass’s house in Chelsea, stuck speakers in the windows and broadcast the album to the neighbourhood. People in the area all woke up realising they were hearing the new Beatles record, and shared a small cultural moment together.

In a much bigger way, this is what’s happening today with Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Because of the way the album’s been distributed, we know that everyone who ordered the MP3s is listening to them right now. That’s potentially hundreds of thousands of people around the world all sharing a musical experience at the same time.

That’s the kind of desperate hyperbole usually reserved for the likes of Live Earth, and we take no notice – mainly because most people who watched Live Earth didn’t then go and leave endless comments about it on countless blogs throughout cyberspace.

This is different, and much more analogous to that Spring morning in 1967. The hierarchy that typically rules music doesn’t apply here – no radio plugger, journalist or DJ had In Rainbows before you or I could get our hands on it. We all got it ‘first’. This is a musical event that people are genuinely passionate about, and are all involved in at exactly the same time.

I think this is significant (and I don’t even like Radiohead!) and proves – not that we ever doubted it – that music is still as powerful today as it was 40 years ago.

Real Ones – Ballad of an Old Man

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