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Radiohead Says Name Your Own Price for New Album
TechDirt is reporting that the band Radiohead has apparently chosen the path less traveled when it comes to the release of their new album. They are offering two very unique methods of purchase for their new music, the ability to name your own price for a digital download or the ability to purchase a special "discbox" which will contain the album on CD and vinyl in addition to a horde of goodies. Will be interesting to see how this new model works out for them and what it might do to more traditional methods.
But it is beautiful PR for Radiohead
Of course it does. That's sort of the point, isn't it? You pay what it is worth to you. If it is worth nothing, pay nothing. If nobody pays anything, we are unlikely to see more music from Radiohead (especially under such permissive marketing schemes) but it wasn't worth anything to you so who cares?
If, on the other hand, it is worth something to you, you might want to send them something to encourage them to continue making music.
It's really quite simple.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Not because $0.00 is a valid price to download, but because they are actually doing something right, valuing a download vs. real physical product in this test. No matter what they do, people will be sharing their music for free, so they capitalize on that for the news bite, AND offer up more than a license to listen to 3+ minutes of music for sale. The way the human mind tends to work, they stand a good chance of making money on this.
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I think this will be very interesting *ONLY IF* Radiohead publishes the results of such a promotion.
It will be interesting because they are (for whatever reason) a relevant and popular band with access to traditional B&M distribution. So we can see (very approximately and inaccurate duh)
-what geographic locations paid the most average price
-what geographic locations which paid nothing
-what the average per-download price was
-highest & lowest price
and so on... esp. since it's not often that a band with as much exposure as Radiohead (don't even say Prince or I will slap you) experiments like this.
I think this (along with, unfortunately, corporate sponsorship) is the future of original music sales. Several years ago, after downloading the fantastic "Source Tags and Codes" album from the Band "And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead", I tried to email the lads and offer them $5 directly for the music.
I got a nice email from someone saying "thanks, but due to contract restrictions with the record label, they could not accept direct donations...please support us by purchasing our album from traditional sources" or something along those lines.
There is something 10x more satisfying by trying to give my hard earned money directly to the artist, and not to the scum-sucking music executives who have, for years, been stealing millions from naive, unsuspecting bands.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
"The traditional business model had been ruined by the Internet," said Grundy. "The industry is still trying to work out what on earth the new model or models should be and this is just one option."
Sucks when you've become redundant, eh? Authors are self-publishing; musicians can sell their songs on-line. They've found that they're doing most of the promotional work anyway, so why are you getting such a big cut? They've peaked behind the curtain and found there is no wizard. You evolve or you get run over.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
That being said, I wonder if this is some kind of strange social experiment to see if anyone actually puts more than $0 in the price box. I probably won't.
Maybe if I was really hard up for cash, I'd consider putting in a lowball amount, but not $0. Putting in $0 would be worse, IMO than stiffing the waitstaff at a nice restaurant on their tip. You're not required to tip them, but you should. Why? They work hard, and make most of their money that way. Maybe it's just me, but I think that artists deserve to be paid for their efforts, even when they don't force the payment. They're asking to be paid a fair price, not to be stiffed. They've cut out the middlemen here, so perhaps that amount is less than you'd pay for a CD on Amazon. Perhaps it's more, for that very reason. They've let you decide.
Actually, I think in this case the rational decision is to give them money because you don't know if anyone else will. If you actually enjoy Radiohead and want to support them, why would you rationally rely on "hope" as a means to their support rather than the logical, "I know Radiohead is getting support, because I supported them."
Now, if Radiohead announced, "Hey, we made 20 million off this idea! Thanks guys!" then I could see the Tragedy of the Commons becoming common.
The problem with this model is that people haven't heard the album, and therefore don't know how good it is, so they can't decide in an informed fashion how much they want to pay for it. Even under the assumption that people will be happiest if they pay what they feel something is worth, I expect that people's happiness falls off more quickly on the overpaying side than the underpaying side, and that people expect this is general, so people will underpay to maximize their expected happiness if they don't know what they will feel something is worth.
My guess is that the slashdot "groupthink" will be positive, and likewise, I'm broadly positive about the attitude behind this.
However, in the details, it ends up leaving me high and dry.
Downloads, for me, are for those cases where "there's only one or two tracks on the CD I really like". If an album is any good, I vastly prefer to buy the CD - I enjoy the physical product, the artwork, lyrics/inlay notes, the free backup, the future-proof lossless quality.
On the other hand, I've no interest in vinyl - I've got no decks!
So with a choice of "buy the mp3s" or "buy the CD and vinyl boxset", I don't really want either :(
Shame they're abandoning the middle ground of selling regular CDs, which I'd guess still represents the majority of music purchasing in the western world today.
(And no, this isn't one of these "and thus I feel justified in pirating" excuse-posts. I spend more of my money on music than any other form of leisure/luxury; over £100/mo isn't uncommon. And I'm in a band who has cd and mp3 sales of our own, and we've been at the wrong end of Russian allofmp3 style sites ("wholly legitimate" cry the slashdotters - legally, perhaps, on a technicality, but not morally... they're not sending any money through) and p2p. So, if I like the sound of this, I will pay for it, but I will be slightly miffed there is no way to get a CD without also wasting money (and space) on unwanted vinyl.)
If it's worth nothing ($0.00) to you, don't download it, because it's worth nothing to you and therefore you have no need of it.
This is the first major label major band defection that I can recall since Trent Reznor, and this will be sizably more influential as Radiohead still has a career left.
The real problem with getting rid of major labels is how artists will handle promotion. Radiohead would not have become this big without mass-media coverage, radio station payola, and other forms of promotion. Independent artists have more freedom and make more money, but how do they promote outside a local area?
technical writing / development
I've always said, if artists I liked would simply put up a paypal link on their page, where I knew all the money went to them... I'd gladly pay even list price for a lot of cd's. Knowing that only 1$ of my 20$ payment goes to the artist, and the rest to the MAFIAA, has long deterred me from purchasing any new music.
SO... how much of my price goes straight to radiohead? And how much goes to the MAFIAA (if any)? The article wasn't really clear about that point... Anyone care to enlighten me/us?
I think this is absolutely great of Radiohead to do, and I give them props for putting their fans first. However, from the perspective of hoping that this moves the industry in the same direction, I don't see that happening. This addresses the problem of "how to cut out the RIAA" from existing, known bands. However, it does not account for how to generate new interest in the marketplace without the RIAA. Currently, 95%+ of the artists out there that most people have actually heard of all still deal with the RIAA.
iTunes and other online distribution stores are a start. However, there still needs to be a better way to get lesser-known artists' music broadcast to as many people as possible, while still cutting the RIAA out of the loop. The answer to that dilemma? Well, I guess I'm not really sure. =/
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I'd like to offer a perspective different from the PR stunt that people seem to think it is.
Perhaps they are just artists. Granted, they've probably made enough money from their prior albums to no longer need to worry about money. They are treating their music like a piece of art. Real art should be free and open to the public (which is why public museums in London are free to the public). If this was their intention then I applaud Radiohead.
Personally, I'm a fan but not the biggest fan. I would've liked to sample the album beforehand but their reputation and previous albums are good enough for me to put money on the line.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Considering that most bands are lucky to see two or three cents per CD sale, I'd say that won't be too hard. I'm going to explain the recording industry for you folks. Follow along and see if you kids can keep up. Let's pretend for a few minutes that you're a musician. You bust your butt gigging, playing all over town and one day some guy walks up to you and says, "Hi! I'm with (fill in name of record company here), and we'd really like to sign you to a recording contract." Well, you get all excited and you sign your deal with the devil.
The devil says "Come to my recording studio and we'll cut the record." Once you get there, they've got the studio lined up, the producer, and a few other people to "help you" make your record. If you ask about how much is going to cost, you get told, as is standard in the recording industry that "it will come out of the profits." Then you cut your album and "you have to promote it". If you ask how much that's going to cost...you guessed it kids, "it comes out of the profits". Now that you have to market your album, you have to go on tour. That means a bus, lights, roadies, stage, sound equipment, etc. If you ask how much that's going to cost...you guessed it kids, "it comes out of the profits".
While you're on tour, you need to have T-shirts, posters, bumper sticker, etc. You also need to have hot dogs, twinkies, beer, and cokes for people to consume during the concert. If you ask how much that's going to cost...you guessed it kids, "it comes out of the profits". By the time they're through pulling all the costs out of "the profits", there usually aren't any profits left, which means all that the artist gets is what ever they get as a signing bonus. Not the advance - the signing bonus - since the advance comes "out of the profits", too.
The way that this works out is that if you're lucky, the artist on any given album might see 1 or 2 cents of the $16.99 you pay for CD of music at Wal-Mart. Given that the Internet is the ideal distribution medium for music, I'd rather just go to the artists web site and buy the songs directly from them. Then the artist would get the whole $16.99 for the album instead of $0.02. But you see, the RIAA can't allow that because in that $16.97 lies their profit margins. Without them, it's a brave new world for digital music.
Why do you and I have to pay a third party middleman to broker the transaction for nothing more than a song? Worse yet, we are required to continue to pay this middleman who threatens to sue both the consumer and the musician when we try to cut him out of the transaction. If the artist tries to sell their songs on the website the RIAA will try to sue them for contract violations. If you and I try to download the music, we get sued. The only reason for this is that it leaves the big, fat RIAA profit margin intact.
The RIAA complains that their sales are down and points an accusing finger at "piracy". I'd like to take a moment to dispel that myth. When Napster was operating at it's peak, music sales were up 20% without the RIAA doing any additional marketing. Viral, word-of-mouth would spread quickly about new bands and good new interesting music. People were buying CD's because they'd get a taste of some stuff and like it. Then they'd go to the store, find the artist and buy some stuff. Now, there's no place to share that isn't full of viruses, worms, trojans, fake files, etc. No more free marketing RIAA - you pretty much litigated the goose that laid the golden egg out of existence.
Compounding the problem is that the RIAA is key in determining what gets pushed to the public. Frankly, I think that they've lost the pulse. We don't care about Brittany Spears, although my husband was caught peering at her photos when she got snapped sans the undies. For some reason, the music industry has decided to cater to 14 year old girls. Why? I don't really know. When's the last time you saw a 14 year old that had more than $20 of disposable income at any given moment? If you
HDGary secures my bank
Two bucks, if delivered straight to their pockets, is more than they would make on the sale of a CD under the typical record company deal, even after subtracting the expense of producing and shipping the media. So...
Cheap CD's for us. More money to the artists. What's not to like? I mean, unless you're the record company.
Your mistake is to assume that standard game theoretic notions of "rationality" apply to human beings. There's ample evidence to the contrary.
40 quid isn't bad for two CDs, two LPs, digital download, a nice book and shipping.
It's assinine to be crapping on about "dynamic range" and so forth. Given the albums provenance it will probably sound like Radiohead want it to sound which is where the actual value lays for people who like their music.
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