Slate’s Machinist blog has some weakly sourced numbers on Radiohead’sname your own price album sale: 1.2 million digital copies sold. "The figure dwarfs first-week sales of"Hail to the Thief," released in 2003, racked up 300,000 sales in its first week; "Amnesiac" managed 231,000 copies in 2001; and "Kid A" hit 207,000 in 2000." Of course, 1.2 million doesn’t mean much if everyone paid nothing. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case:
But we may have a clue. The British music newsletter Record of the Day conducted a poll of 3,000 purchasers of the album. People paid an average price of £4, about $8, the newsletter found.
Because the band isn’t working with a record label, it gets to keep all that money. If it had sold its songs instead on iTunes, it would likely have seen less than $1.50 per album.
There’s some incentive to lie and inflate the amount you paid, but even at £2 per album they’d still be beating the pants off going through iTunes. I bought it paying £5. I meant to actually only pay half that, I didn’t notice immediately that it was in Pounds and then didn’t figure out how to lower the amount without starting over. I thought the album was alright, although I tend to find heavily electronic albums a bit muddy. That said, it was still kinda neat participating in the experiment.
Shadi Hamid over at Democracy Arsenal highly praises the whole idea:
This is, as far as I can tell, the first time a band as big as Radiohead has completely superceded and subverted the whole infrastructure for selling records. If Radiohead pulls this off, they’ll be sure to pocket much more profit, paving the way for other artists to follow suit. Everyone benefits: we get our music for cheaper; Radiohead gets more money; the middle man gets cut out; and the music world suddenly becomes democratic in a way it never was - or could have been - before.
So you say you want a revolution? Get on with it, then. Go right ahead and buy the new album.
That said, a commenter notes that they didn’t manage to cut out the credit card companies, who are charging ~$1 a sale. The main disappointing thing about the whole experience for me was that they didn’t take Paypal. I figure the next attempt probably will.
Okay, I admire this, and I'm glad enough people like them that others may emulate it. But, at the risk of sounding uncool, I never liked Radiohead beyond Creep, and I'm not interested in the album even if it is free.
Now, if this was, say, Franz Ferdinand or Arctic Monkeys or such, I would be happy to comply. I'd be happy to pay directly to musicians if I can; isn't that the fun of buskers, if you have the time to listen to them?
Posted by: Moti | October 15, 2007 at 05:34 PM
Yup. I only really did it because I don't actually know Radiohead that well either way and I figured it was as good of a time as any to try them out.
Posted by: Greg Sanders | October 16, 2007 at 11:54 AM