Staff Blogs

Jon Chappell

< Back to contents page

The results of Radiohead's experiment

iTWire is reporting that Radiohead's experimental approach of allowing listeners to choose the price they would be willing to pay for their album was, largely, successful.

Predictably, the majority (62%) of people chose to pay absolutely nothing. However, 10% of people chose to pay a price comparable to what they would pay in a store, whilst the majority of the remaining customers paid between $4 and $8.

Radiohead earned, on average, $2.26 per album sold. Not very much when albums sell on iTunes for $10. But if they were to sell the album on iTunes, they would only make $1 per album with the rest being split between Apple and the record label. It's also interesting to note that not only did they make more money (even with hosting costs), they lost none of it to piracy.

The article raises the question of how successful this approach would have been if it had been an unknown band adopting this approach. My personal belief is that although there will always be freeloaders in life, if the content is good enough there will always be people who want to see more good content in the future. The internet is the perfect place for viral marketing, if you know how to exploit it.

The album, In Rainbows, is available here for whatever price you'd like.

Categories: Industry, Indie, Analysis
Post ID: 64Posted Wednesday November 7 2007 7:39 PM

Bookmark with:

Add new comment

Name:
Email:
Message:

To prevent unwanted comments from spam-bots and other automated agents, please enter the code below:
Code:

Comments, suggestions, bug reports? Leave feedback%%PAGE_URL%%