This whole thing Radiohead’s doing, encouraging remixes of its songs is way clever.
To make remixing easy, the separate ‘stems’ from the song are available to purchase from iTunes. The ‘stems’ available are bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. You can mix them in any way you like, either by adding your own beats and instrumentation, or just remixing the original parts.
The public will listen and vote for their favourite remix (voting ends May 1st). You can also create a widget allowing votes from your own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be counted as ‘mix votes’ back on radioheadremix.com. Radiohead will listen to the best remixes.
Once upon a time the product and the ad for the product were completely separate entities. Then content itself began to do double duty as the promotional unit. Now it’s the direct personal experience with the content that can become its own promotion. It’s not just Radiohead pushing their song anymore. Everyone who creates a remix of the song, creates their own personal experience with it, is now involved in generating more exposure for it.
Culture no longer fits all that well into the role of a packaged good (if it ever did). Now there is more and more opportunity–and reason–to approach cultural content as a raw material, one used in the construction of expression.
PS. Go treat your ears to the ESKMO REMIX.