From Nick Hornby's New Yorker review of Radiohead [ tickets ]'s "Kid A":

You have to work at albums like "Kid A." You have to sit at home night after night and give yourself over to the paranoid millennial atmosphere as you try to decipher elliptical snatches of lyrics and puzzle out how the titles ("Treefingers," "The National Anthem," and so on) might refer to the songs. In other words, you have to be sixteen. Anyone old enough to vote may find that he has competing demands for his time--a relationship, say, or a job, or buying food, or listening to another CD he picked up on the same day. He may also find himself shouting at the CD player, "Shut up! You're supposed to be a pop group!" (The music critics who love "Kid A," one suspects, love it because their job forces them to consume music as a sixteen-year-old would. Don't trust any of them.)

All 11-tracks from Spice Girls' new album, "Forever", due to be released in the U.K. on Nov. 6, have become available on Napster. The LP filtered onto Napster after it was loaded in Real Audio format onto the group's official site and then converted by fans into MP3 files. Virgin Records refused to comment on whether the uploading of the entire album was intentional.

Moby [ tickets ] and Hugh Masekela are among the electronica artists who will perform at the ACA World Sound Festival in Acupulco, Mexico, on Nov. 2-5.

Inside.com reported on a marketing strategy behind Backstreet Boys [ tickets ]' forthcoming "Black and Blue" album. An L.A.-area marketing firm and the group's management company have rounded up a reported 12,000 fans--dubbed the Backstreet Boys Official Online Street Team--to assist them in promoting the album. ("Street teams"--in which fans literally take to the streets of their neighborhoods to promote a band--have been around for some time.)

The fans receive newsletters that importune them to do things like write about the new album on chat rooms, vote for the first single on MTV's "TRL," and pre-order the new album. One goal is to create in the minds of the fans the idea that they are BSB insiders.

One of the marketing jagoffs, referring to a similar effort on behalf of 'NSync, was quoted as saying, "The kids themselves started to challenge one another within the group, not to just buy one record or two records, but to buy three and four copies because they were so focused on beating the Backstreet Boys' first-week SoundScan record."

Whoa. What?

If any member of 'NSync's or Backstreet Boys' "street team" is reading this:

It's A Cult.

You Must Bail Immediately.

Marketing People Are Not Your Friends. They Laugh At You During Lunch. That Laughter Masks Their Virulent Self-Loathing.

And What The Hell Do You Need More Than One Copy Of A CD For?

And Why The Hell Do You Care About Someone's SoundScan Record?

Bail.

Spread The Word.

Be Your Own Street Team.

From staff reports, compiled by opinionated James Woster.