Radiohead’s In Rainbows: 62% for free
Radiohead’s grand experiment in ‘honesty box’ music sales may have gone a little flat after a report found that three in five people downloading the band’s latest album did not pay a cent for it. Of the 1.2 million people who have downloaded In Rainbows since it was released last month, 62 per cent did not pay anything, and 12 per cent accounted for more than 52 per cent of the revenue from sales. The average price paid was $6 (£2.90) globally, but this figure was propped up by the 12 per cent who were willing to pay between $8 to $12 (£3.90 to £5.80) - the approximate cost of downloading an album from a retail service like iTunes, the report, by comScore, concluded. American music-lovers were the most generous, paying on average $8.05 (£3.89). Outside the US, the average amount parted with was $4.64 (£2.24).
At the time, the band’s decision was viewed by some as a future direction for the industry, which has struggled to combat declining sales in the face of widespread illegal downloading. But labels and other industry representatives expressed disappointment in the wake of yesterday’s report, saying that while a band with an established fan base was able to take such risks, it was not an option for new bands, who still benefit from the support of labels. A source at one of the major labels said that allowing fans to pay what they wanted for music would never work, because people would always steal. “Radiohead tried to spin this is offering a service for fans, but it was nothing more than a marketing ploy to make themselves relevant again and prepare for their next release. While most critics and labels consider these numbers as a failure, I wouldn’t be that pesimistic: are you sure there would be over 1 million people willing to pay for the album in stores? There would be “free” mp3 rips anyway…
Source: Times, Cnet
i payed for it
i downloaded it
i liked it … A LOT
I’m sure a lot of people paid nothing at first and went back later and payed for it if they liked it.
I heard about this on this on the radio, I was not sure how it was going to work out but there you go! I think more artists could do this through their websites and get revenue from ads or whatever -> rather than giving revenue to RSLOG
… you know I’m only kidding!!
if people want to listen to music in all its glory then they have to buy the original . mp3s @ 192kbps are for listening on your pc or mp3 player not for high fidelity stereos .
oops typo … I obviously meant RLSLOG, buy ye know that anyway
if people want to listen to music in all its glory then they have to buy the original . mp3s @ 192kbps are for listening on your pc or mp3 player not for high fidelity stereos .
even if you payed for in rainbows you still got 192kb/s mp3’s
you can get flac releases of some albums in torrents
That 62% stat and the average paid per download would be a lot more meaningful compared to, say, the percentage of people who paid for the last Radiohead album and the average amount they made per album after the label took its enormous cut.
I’d guess they did much better with this “pay what you want” model.
@7 agree ;O
there’s also the people waiting for the retail cd that come into the equation.
download for free then a couple of months later buy the cd
First of all, I’m a guy who buy the music I listent to, so don’t get me wrong.
Thing is, if I’m going to buy a album from a band I like, I want the the actual CD, so I can hold it in my hand. On Radiohead’s website you only had two options, one was to choose a price of what you wanted to pay for the download, second option was the ‘Disc-box’ which contained CD’s and LP’s and some other stuff. I wanted the discbox, it was the first I looked at, and if it would’ve been a normal CD that I just could’ve ordered for a normal price, I would’ve ordered it. But in this case, it was a disc-box with a lot of extra stuff that costed 40£, and in my eyes that is way too much.
My point is that a lot of people want to buy the album but not the download, it doesn’t feel right if you can’t hold it in your hand and all that. It’s just a matter of principles that we can’t escape really. I bet the statistics would’ve come out differently if they would’ve had a 3rd option wehere you could just order the actual CD for a reasonable amount of money.
I know I would’ve bought that atleast.
I downloaded it via bittorrent, but I’m gonna order it and the band will get £40
Hey r-tards, Radiohead’s In Rainbows’s quality was 160kb/s NOT 192kb/s! Stupids..
yeah the problem was is that this had ver ylow bitrate, i am going to buy the cd version for the album, but heck no am i paying for 160kb/s, but for free it’s fine. So if they wanted their sales go better they probably should have offered a better bitrate :3
so they made £3m or about $6m? and that is classed as a failure? i think the music industry is bloated… Estimates taken from ‘The average price paid was $6 (£2.90) ‘ + ‘Of the 1.2 million people ‘
I don’t get it….
1.2 mln downloaded the album. 38 % paid for it with the avarage of 6 dolars….
or am I calculating something wrong?
that means let say 500 000 peaople x 6 $ = 3.000 000 $
devide it by 5 members of the band gives 600 000 dolars each band member….
i think it’s incredibile! nice for just one month
not to mention what they get from conerts…
“which has struggled to combat declining sales”
I wish having those declining sales… wtf
They still have millions of profit…
Radiohead-In_Rainbows-Retail-2007-EOS
I’m one of the ones who didn’t pay anything. Not that I wasn’t willing to, but I downloaded it and listened to it once and deleted it. I had planned on going back and paying for it if I liked it but I didn’t, so I didn’t.
If the album had been to my liking, I’d have payed $20 US for it just to show that the system worked.
Anyone who payed any money for 160kb/s mp3’s is r-tard and should die..
@4,
It’s true but look what Trent Reznor and Saul Williams are doin’. 192 for free, and if you pay only $5, you have the option of 192 // 320 // lossless FLAC.
You evben get the booklet in the free package as well.
http://niggytardust.com/saulwilliams/download
@ 4, 6, 13
If they used a commercial encoder expect lower quality, however LAME’s PSY model is made for such tasks as to reduce the bitrate to the most a human ear can recognize… the FLAC is a lot better than MP3 problem is… just you!
oh the poor bastids might have to get a real job now :p
I’ll admit that I downloaded it for free from a torrent. but I loved the album, so I went back and paid $15 for it. I’m not an audiophile, so the quality was better than the average 128kbps you can find on Frostwire. its just good music, and i support them 100% with what they did.
I would have gladly payed £10 if they allowed me to pay with PAYPAL…the days of entering all you details every time you want to buy something are long gone.
And of course the release was spin…any self respecting fan would place this album firmly between Amnesiac and Hail to the thief…that’s not to say i didn’t love it!
i got it from demonoid on the releases date since their website was crawling and frankly their download quality is really bad but then its free so not to complain
But then Creep is still thier best song and this album did’nt had much to crazy about
Since when they should play with millions?
A lot of people are doing a lot more useful things and they die without having millions. There are engineers or doctors or professor who spend tens of years working hard and they die without having millions.
Since when J-LO or Britney or any other should be so rich? What did, Michael Jackson or Angelina Jolie, so important for this planet to deserve all that huge amount of money? If Brad Pitt deserves TENS OF MILLIONS to entertain us for 2 hours who much a doctor deserves when save a life?
If you google this: The Globalization of Hunger you will be probably amazed to see how many hundert of millions don’t have enough money to eat, and nobody cares. But too many cares if Madonna make 10 songs and somebody share them on the internet, too many cares if Harry Potter has been downloaded for free, and so on…
All these multi millionaires should be very ashamed when put in their pockets all that amount of money.
Radiohead - In Rainbows (320kb Final)
http://www.torrentportal.com/download/1431136/Radiohead+-+In+Rainbows+(320kb+Final).zip.torrent
thanks for the link Lutter, Saul Williams FTW!
Shame:
Why is it so bad to have millions of dollars? It’s survival of the fittest. If Brad Pitt can make a 2 hour movie instead of going to medical school for 8 years and make millions, why not? He’s doing what’s best for his family. You can’t take care of everyone. The United States gives more money to Africa to help feed people. Does it help? No. The crooked African governments take the money and aid for themselves. Why should Brad Pitt throw his money down the same hole? Of course doctors and engineers are a more noble profession. I agree. But don’t hate on someone for getting rich. Instead or putting someone else down, why not bring yourself up and rise to the occasion?
a newbie band getting 1mill USD/month = failure?
thats insane! 
Feck all of these artists…Radiohead my ass..he is just finding out how to feck us on line with his I am with you! campaign…I am a Pirate and I ain’t paying a fecking penny for anything I find free on line..ffs…”Oh Ya if I get it for free and I like it..I will buy it later” May achin ARSE…!
Long live Pirates!
I think its all FUD from the record labels, they want to stamp it as a failure so they can keep their monopoly.
mouhaha
tbfh it was a awesome success witch granted them more income then if they would have gone with a record label.
If only their music was good and came in FLAC they might have been even mroe successfull
This article is just further proof that Americans are the most responsible and generous people in the world.
The cheap Europeans could barely cough up $5 a piece, while the Americans saw fit to pay over $8 a piece.
Maybe after paying all of their social taxes, the Europeans just don’t have much left for expenses such as music. Sad
Radiohead really did prove that this kind of system works. The band got $3M in a month from the venture - far more than could be reasonably expected under the existing system where artists are paid a mere pittance (er - i mean royalty) from each album sold with the rest of the cash going to the labels, producers, and the many retail middlemen along the way. That’s assuming the band has paid back all of the startup “support” they got from the label when they first started out - ya! not only do the labels take the big cut of record sales $$, but they aggressively claw back every measly cent they invest into a band to begin with!!
So the labels, producers, distributors etc (read” the “industry”) make no money at all under this new system. Gee, I wonder why they consider radiohead’s effort a “failure”. Hmmm. That’s really puzzling.
There’s only one tiny little detail about radiohead’s proposed system that will make it crumble. See, radiohead made the $3M because over a million people downloaded their album. Who paid what is irrelevant - it took over a million customers to generate the $3M in revenue. And where did all these people come from? From radiohead’s huge fan base of course. And that’s the catch - the huge fan base. Without millions of adoring fans, the whole system falls right on it’s face. A new band has little to no fan base, so at least for now they need the hype and marketing abilities of these scumbag labels in order to jetison their careers.
Until there is a paradigm shift in consumerism the existing system will remain a necessary evil.
@Shame
Why don’t those hundreds of millions of people have enough money to buy food? What do they do for a living that keeps them from earning enough to even buy food?
To be straight to the point, regardless of a majority of people downloading it for free, it was a success. As pointed out, the album would have be leaked onto p2p regardless, and people who probably would have ’stolen’ the album, did chip a bit in.
Now, look at previous Radiohead album sales. Hail To The Thief sold 300,000 sales in its first week, Kid A and Amnesiac much less. Doing the math for the people who did pay for In Rainbows, it works out that 384,000 did pay something for the album. It’s an improvement.
Secondly, the band themselves will be earning 100% of the profit. Atypically a band will earn 5% from each album, and the rest going towards the retail chain and the record company. It’s win win win for Radiohead, and future big name artists.
I just believe this article or finding is simply a way the record industries are using to protect their high profits, rather than sharing them with the artists. Anyone else agree with me?
Wow, any time I even come close to thinking that Americans aren’t the most ignorant, self-centered group of idiots roaming the planet one of ‘em like good ol’ Alfred there (#33) pops in with douchebag statements like that and just blows that notion all to hell. Really, guys, if you really are NOT like that you should think twice about giving Alfred there the chance to speak on your behalf. It makes it hard to take those of you seriously who aren’t just raving morons. It really does.
I would even go so far as to say that at least 20% of all non-paying downloads were organized by the record labels.
The success of this way of trade will eventually extinguish the need for record labels, they must be aware of this.
One other band circumvented the labels, Machinae Supremacy.
They are a huge success, and they should be…
@ben-a (#36):
LOL - was agreeing with you even as you were typing your post I would imagine. That’s pretty much my opinion of this situation - the industry is not going to endorse a system that effectively makes 75% of said industry obsolete and unemployed.
@z@ph0d
You have a point there, a new band just starting out wouldn’t have a million fans to go to their website and even try listening to their music.
That is where the record label becomes useful. So they earn their money by getting a whole lot of publicity for their bands.
@z@ph0d
I appreciate your honesty, regardless of how pig headed you sound. There is no other viewpoint to take from the facts that are stated in the story other than what I stated.
Americans paid more for this music that the rest of the world did. Simple as that.
I wish coldplay does the same thing. They will get at least $100 for the album!
Even if only 62% paid… they MADE $10 million.
http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/radiohead_make_10_million_from_in_rainbows.html
I am sorry but this news devides people of the world on:
AMERICA and EVERYTHNG ELSE THAT IS NOT AMERICA
It is a bit to self - centered to make a conclusion that america is the most generous don’t you think?
Probably UK got higher prices (i am not from uk
Tom York should pay me for listening to his crapppy “music”…
@Rev-o
What article did you read dude? It doesn’t say that at all.
stupid statistics. also music stores will not have the same prices all over the world.
Did they sell more than 1 million with their previous albums ? NO ! So why is this a failure ? It sold great, although at a lower price and it was good publicity.
Success on both ends.
radiohead SUCKS
@Alfred
I’m not challenging the facts that the article or yourself stated (facts= dollar amounts paid). Your opinions and statements about these facts are what worry me. To then so strongly state that said opinions and conclusions are the only ones possible or correct is just the “alarmingly american” icing on the cake. I don’t like to judge people by stereotype, but it’s hard when some people almost seem to be trying to live up to that very mold.
At 49.
Why do you think they suck? I mean, just stating that they suck ain’t much to walk on.
@42 62% DID NOT PAY so only 38% of them payed with most of the ppl outside of us paying only $4 bucks & america paying only $8
It was for free, so i didn’t download it. it wouldn’t feel right not to have stolen something from someone, i can’t enjoy my music otherwise…
especially music i dont even like…
why do music artist expect to make money in this day and age by selling albums?? they need to grow a brain and go on tour..
I downloaded it for free. I wouldn’t have bought it. That’s not to say that it’s a bad album, just not one that I’d have gone out of my way to find in a music store.
End result: I have the new Radiohead album on my hard drive, which I may occasionally listen to. They have not gained, or lost anything as a result. What’s the difference between that and me recording it from the radio?
what about labels like magnatune.com?
why doesn’t anyone else follow that model?
im not being funny but if the band asks people to pay what they want for it, if some dont offer anything why does the record industry person say theyre stealing it? how can it be stealing if theyre given permission to take it???
maybe the countries that paid less for it were the ones who are always paying too much for cds- like rip off britain. over here in the uk many people are fed up with paying too much for total crap theyre bound to be weary of offers like this. theyre just fed up of lining the pockets of fat cats and multi millionaire “artists”. if the cds were reasonably priced at their real value in the first place customers- yes i said CUSTOMERS wouldnt buy pirated stuff in the first place. who in their right mind would pay around £10 for a cd with one half decent song on it, or some crappy mp3 download from an official fat cat site?
anyway, regarding the radiohead album- i havent heard it myself yet but as theyre a quality band i would pay around £ for it then if i like it i will buy the deluxe set or whatever it is, as i think an mp3 download isnt the same as a cd and is quite worthless to me in a physical sense
sorry in the previous post i meant i would pay around £3.50!!!!
The important part here is whether the BAND made more money from doing it this way rather than using a record label to do the release in the traditional ways. Buying the album from itunes or a shop or wherever means that the band would only get a fraction of the money from the sales, the record companies all make a lot of oney from each sale which is a lot more that what the band are getting. If the band got say 1USD for each sale using the traditional methods they would still be making less that what they got doing it this way. Some people will always get there music for free from BT or copying the CD from a friend so it does not make too much difference.
To me it is a success if they band have more money in there pocket now than if they used the traditional method of using a record company.
It is a good album.
@Thirdman
No difference to me. The music guys would prefer you record it off the radio for the simple fact you would be subject to their ads. Unlike the other ads you saw when you downloaded it.
Downloading music for free is NOT stealing, if the artist says “hey go ahead and download for free.” Personally I’m an artist myself so I felt like chiming in on this one.
All of my tunes are free, I even made torrents of them. Sure maybe only, ten, fifteen people have downloaded them from torrents total (as opposed to a million)…but who cares? Music should be about sharing (keyword there, sharing) your ideas and your creation with others, why else would I bother recording it in the first place?? For myself to listen to?!
If people feel some crazy compelling need to give me money for my hard work, hundreds of free songs, storyline, and all that crap, they can do so on paypal and I will happily waste it on tacos.
I really hope record labels are on the way out and musicians everywhere can start breaking out of the norm. I’m tired of one album from a band every one-two years with one “hit” on the entire thing. People make a big deal out of an artist releasing two discs worth of boring material at once, like it’s some kind of feat. Write better songs, write more of them, or hang it up and go back to flipping burgers!
That’s all I have to say on the matter. Ciao.
@Martin “percent” not “per cent”. big difference. learn english, please.
if you like radiohead i came across this site which is really goood
http://www.musebootlegs.com/blog/
“it was not an option for new bands”
Maybe the person that said that should take a look at the Swedish band Lamont and their cooperation with The Pirate Bay.
I would like to see a recordcompany put up that amouint of PR for a first releese.The problems of the record industry really is all about lack of imagination and skill.It consists of money counters that knowqs zip about music.
Radiohead’s downtown album is their best work of all time?