Radiohead: Pay What You Want for New Album
October 1st, 2007Radiohead just blew the support columns out from underneath the already doomed music industrial complex. I know that Cryptogon is read mainly by people who have never heard of Radiohead, so, if you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, just know that Radiohead is a very big deal in the music world and they just went with a direct to consumer business model with a voluntary payment option for their work.
As for the record company executives: They just soiled their union suits.
Via: Time:
Roughly 12,000 albums are released in an average year, so the announcement late Sunday night that the new Radiohead record, In Rainbows, will be out Oct. 10 is not itself big news. Sure, Radiohead is on a sustained run as the most interesting and innovative band in rock, but what makes In Rainbows important — easily the most important release in the recent history of the music business — are its record label and its retail price: there is none, and there is none.
In Rainbows will be released as a digital download available only via the band’s web site, Radiohead.com. There’s no label or distribution partner to cut into the band’s profits — but then there may not be any profits. Drop In Rainbows’ 15 songs into the on-line checkout basket and a question mark pops up where the price would normally be. Click it, and the prompt “It’s Up To You” appears. Click again and it refreshes with the words “It’s Really Up To You” — and really, it is. It’s the first major album whose price is determined by what individual consumers want to pay for it. And it’s perfectly acceptable to pay nothing at all.
Radiohead’s contract with EMI/Capitol expired after its last record, Hail to the Thief, was released in 2003; shortly before the band started writing new songs, singer Thom Yorke told TIME, “I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say ‘F___ you’ to this decaying business model.”
Related: I’d Rather Just Pay Artists Directly for MP3s
Related: A Kirkland Cafe with No Prices
Trent of Nine Inch Nails also recently suggested fans steal the new CD rather than pay for it. A lot of discontent in an industry that screws over both the producers and consumers of the product, go figure.
http://www.theninhotline.net/news/index.php#1189989696
Hey, what do you think I am Kevin, a fossil or something? What Radiohead just did was amazing radical. My cousin’s wife used to date Trent of Nine Inch Nails. The music industry is trying to using Big Pharma’s game plan for sales I guess.
Blowback big time.
The music industry and the people who make music are going the route of organic farming: we who make the food/music ought to make the cash. Goodbye profiteers who suppress quality and profits to those who are laboring to produce their arts, and deserve to be number one when it comes to making a profit.
Radiohead are smart.
This is a good move for a band in their position, who are not greedy and don’t desparately need the money.
I’d pay something for the download. A nominal amount.
But then I would listen to it for a few weeks, and if I really liked it, I could just go back to their site and “buy” it again.
If I think it’s worth more, I’ll pay more.
Fair enough.
The people who listen to their music aren’t being treated as idiots.
The major record companies are…parasites.
Not every artist can do this direct model, but there are lots of ways to improve things for artists and music buyers that are far superior to the conventional model, which pretty much lost the plot in the 90s.