For Radiohead, the experiments continue. Fresh from allowing fans to name their price to download the new album, In Rainbows, the band has announced plans to rerelease its entire seven-CD back catalog.

The twist: It's a boxed set on a USB memory stick - the same plug- in flash stick some school kids use to save and turn in their homework.

The four-gig stick will contain six studio albums and a live release in lossless WAV files. That will appeal to both the iPod user, who can easily convert those files to MP3, and audio purists who demand the best sound and bit-rate. No prices have been announced.

Radiohead's not the first to try this. Other artists have released music on memory sticks with little success. One exception: Nine Inch Nails deliberately leaked its latest album, Year Zero, by leaving one song at a time on memory sticks in the restrooms at its concert, betting that a fan would find it, upload it and create pre-release buzz. It worked.

The naysayers continue to resist the change. News came this week that 62 percent of those who did the "name your price" buy from Radiohead decided that the perfect price was zero. The rest paid an average of $8.05 each in the U.S., $4.64 each outside the U.S.

Some look at that as a failure, but they don't take into account how many would have downloaded for free anyway - and the fact that the physical CD hits stores later this year. This was just the preview. More than 1 million people went to the Web site, which put millions of dol- lars into Radiohead's pockets just for providing links and sharing files.

Despite efforts to write off the CD as dead, it seems to be still kicking. Sales will be down 15 percent more this year, but The Eagles' new Wal- Mart-only album, Long Road Out of Eden, shocked the industry by moving 711,000 copies last week - proof that music fans will still pay for music they want.

Radiohead's not stupid, either: The boxed set will be available both on traditional CD and as an online download. They're covering all the bases.

120 years of how music got to your ears

The back story on recording music is convoluted and technical; multitrack recording, magnetic tape, metal mastering, digital transfers, Pro-Tools, whatever. Here's a look back:

1800s

EDISON CYLINDERS: Round, fragile cylinders resembling the cardboard tube you're left with when the toilet paper runs out. It kicked off the notion of a needle pulling sound out of cut grooves, a technology that dominated for 100 years.

Early 1900s

GRAMOPHONE DISCS: Same idea, turned flat. To get any decent sound, they had to spin at 78 rpm. Unfortunately, they spun so fast that they held little music, and a whole classical piece would span several of the fragile but heavy shellac discs. This is where the term record album was born, as it would take an album-size set of 78s, as well as the term Grammys.

1940s

VINYL RECORDS: Les Paul figured out that vinyl sounded better and lasted longer. Deeper-cut grooves and better plate mastering brought records that could spin at 33 1/3 rpm and still sound good. Single songs were released on 45s, with even better fidelity.

1970s

TAPE: Technology made tape smaller. Cassettes took off and stayed strong into the '80s. Eight-tracks, playing in continuous tape loops, fared poorly. You couldn't rewind, and record companies chopped up albums to make them fit the format.

1980s

CDs: The industry promised perfect sound (it lied) on indestructible discs (it lied) that were far superior to vinyl (it lied).

1990s

MP3 and Napster: Anyone?

2007

USB flash sticks: Why force your fans to convert music to computer files to upload on the Internet when you can cut out the middleman?

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