How much are people really paying for Radiohead?
As it turns out, not as much as Radiohead’s evil record label used to. As The Register reports on the Open Season podcast, not only have Radiohead fans been misrepresenting how much they’ve been paying for the free In Rainbows, but even if we take their word for it, it’s still not as much as Radiohead would make had the band stayed with EMI.
People told the survey that they paid 8 pounds ($16), but the numbers don’t support this. People actually paid closer to 2.50 ($5). Radiohead normally make about 3 ($6) (after royalties and such) with their record label. As such, Radiohead is actually making less giving the songs away than they did with the greedy capitalist record label, EMI.
So, was Radiohead foolish to experiment with free distribution? Or is it the sort of model that only millionaire artists can afford to indulge? (And is there an open-source analog here?)
I’m not sure, but I really did pay $20 for my copy of In Rainbows, and it is well worth it.
Oh, and by the way, Capgemini did a report which found that iTunes and the unbundling of singles represents a far greater threat to the record labels in terms of revenues lost than peer-to-peer file sharing:
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