Many fans feels they purchased a glorified demo…

The Radiohead offering of letting fans decide the price of their new record began with excitment, respect, and admiration. Fans are now angry over the low quality of the downloads and the band’s manager’s statement that the you-choose-the-price downloads were just a promotional tool for the release of the physical CD.

Radiohead’s previous albums were already available as MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits per second — the highest-possible compression rate in the format, but it was announced that the new record RAINBOWS would be available at 160 kbps (poor quality) — after the majority of their fans had already paid for the download. To be fair, the band did give the fans the power of choosing how much they wanted to pay to download the album.

Most promo MP3s come at a higher bit rate,” wrote the author of U.K. blog Kids Pushing Kids. “Worst pound and pence I’ve ever spent.”

I have lost a bit of respect for Radiohead for this. I would never make people pay for 160. They may as well just stream stuff off MySpace” responded one commenter.

No one seemed to understand why Radiohead decided to release Rainbows at 160 kpbs, though guitarist Jonny Greenwood told Rolling Stone, “We talked about it and we just wanted to make it a bit better than iTunes, which it is, so that’s kind of good enough, really.

Statements from band’s management that seem to indicate that the downloadable album was just promotional tool for physical CD also resulted in disgrunted fans.

Is Radiohead fighting for the fans and the music? or is this a kanye west marketing plan in disguise. Maybe everyone is just nitpicking…