Atoms For Peace may have made music headlines when band members Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich publicly pulled their music from Spotify in protest over the streaming service’s royalties model that pays artists “fuck all”, stirring musicians and industry alike into discussion over whether the Swedish-based music platform was indeed “bad for music.”
But even though Yorke and Godrich pulled three albums from Spotify – Atoms For Peace’s Amok, The Eraser by Thom Yorke, and the self-titled debut from Ultraísta – in a boycott of the service, that doesn’t mean they’re against new platforms full stop, and in fact, the band are following in the foot-steps of Splendour’s (not so) Mystery Band Alt-J and announced a partnership with emerging live music platform soundhalo.
As reported in May, Alt-J helped the global launch of soundhalo (small ‘s’ mind) is essentially a downloadable smartphone app that offers streams and paid downloads of high-quality concert footage as the gig is actually happening. Meaning that as soon as Alt-J finished playing their sold out Brixton Academy show, the entire concert was available in high definition video for download – track-by-track – in MP4 video recording format as well as a separate audio tracks. Think of it is an iTunes for officially bootlegged live albums and concerts. “Soundhalo provides… an experience that you want to remember… as the concert has happened.” – Nigel Godrich
Now the Thom Yorke-fronted supergroup, Atoms For Peace, is the second major name to partner with soundhalo for their upcoming headline shows at London’s Roundhouse on Thursday 26th and Friday 27th July. So while the thousands-strong audience can enjoy the band in person, millions more will be able to stream the footage via soundhalo anywhere in the world and download the gig, track by track, as it happens live.
This isn’t some crummy iPhone footage you’ll be accessing either, with the soundhalo team promising that their largest transmission to date will be “using some of the world’s best studio engineers to maintain the true quality and authentic sound of live performance.” The ins and outs of the technology are a bit mum, but some preview footage from soundhalo shows what to expect in the audio/visual department.
Speaking about Atoms For Peace giving soundhalo their high stamp of approval (this is the band that took Spotify to task after all), Nigel Godrich says of the partnership; “Part of the reason soundhalo was interesting to me was that I found myself wondering why, whenever you go to a gig, the next day there are a million shaky, horrible sounding YouTube videos already online. But you go and look because you want to see something of your experience,” he said.
“Soundhalo provides something really functional – an experience that you want to remember in front of you as soon as the concert has happened. To be able to relive that is a really great thing,” adds the long-time Radiohead producer.
Soundhalo was co-founded by two Australian industry figures, CEO Liza Boston and former Hunters & Collectors guitarist Barry Palmer, who writes in a blog post on the official soundhalo website how the pair’s shared passion for music and technology hit upon their “holy grail” idea: “of capturing, in real time, a band’s live performance – the music, the visuals, the whole thing – mixed, mastered and graded straight from the stage to a smart phone in an instant.”
