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Name-Your-Cost Radiohead Album Pirated More Than Purchased
phantomfive writes "Forbes is reporting that despite Radiohead giving their latest album away 'for free', more copies of the album were pirated than downloaded from their site. Commentators offered up the opinion that this was probably more out of habit than malice. People download from regular BitTorrent sources, and may not have fully understood the band's very new approach to the subject. Regardless, Readiohead's efforts are having some measurable effect, as noted by the chairman of EMI: 'The industry, rather than embracing digitalization and the opportunities it brings for promotion of product and distribution through multiple channels, has stuck its head in the sand. Radiohead's actions are a wake-up call which we should all welcome and respond to with creativity and energy.'"
Even if they let you get it for free by putting a 0 in the price box, it's embarrassing to do so. They're only talking to a computer but even so, it's somewhat less shameful if you're not virtually confronted by the people you're ripping off.
Instead of sugared-up theories about why this happened, it's possible that the model simply won't work.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Terms of the contract allow the user to specify no payment value and still download. Piracy is theft. Offering an item at optional cost does not allow for it to be stolen.
technical writing / development
Perhaps people just didn't want to overload their servers?
:P Apparently they were alright with people downloading with no payment, suggesting that it'd be better to just leech off of them rather than torrent it, but it still seems wrong. Don't a sizable number of slashdotters seed (linux distro) torrents after completing, in the hopes that they can give a little bit back to their favourite OS?
If I had no intention of paying, but wanted a copy, I might have downloaded it off of a torrent just so that their server didn't have to give me the whole thing.
I'm getting it off some random schmucks and contributing *my* bandwidth towards serving their songs up. Seems like a possible explanation to me anyway.
They don't get to add another number to their "people who downloaded from us" but their server costs go down somewhat.
I dunno if it's malevolent or kind to do this
I got mine off pirate bay. I have all their other major releases on CDs. I'm not paying for 160kbps [i'm not an audiophile, i'm just not deaf] tracks and i'm not paying for an $80 box set. Radiohead, this was nice, but set up a middleground please.
That's the price they pay for being the first to try this. Bittorrent is less expensive, faster (often), more convenient and less restrictive that a lot of the other methods. So even the album was free, one might still prefer to use via a torrent indexer.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I bought the disc box for ~$80 USD. Not because I thought it was a great album but because I wanted to support this model. The album is ok from what I've heard on MPR but it's growing on me.
I was curious so I asked around at work, it sounds like people are pay around four or five pounds ($8-$10). And I'm glad that I haven't had to guilt trip anyone into paying for it. Although, everyone I work with does receive a decent paycheck. I hope that by buying the discbox and encouraging people to buy it, it offsets the poorer people and the college kids. Having been in both those places, I sympathize heavily with them.
But, I hope that with writing, music & software people will realize how easy it is to disseminate the product and more will open up to the model of charging very little to touch millions instead of charging millions to reach very little.
I hope the shipping of the discbox goes better for Radiohead than it did for Prince. I can't wait to get my hands on that vinyl. I don't care what you say, it feels good to 'own' something even though the rights and definitions of that seem to deteriorate daily.
My work here is dung.
inrainbows.com was more or less useless for 2-3 days after the release. I did end up buying a copy for a few dollars, but it was much, much faster to just download the damn thing off of BitTorrent.
Lots of my friends torrented the album early. Let all this conserved bandwidth be a lesson to Radiohead about not releasing the album when it's finished.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
My favorite band. Just like the Beatles..
I actually tried to buy the album. I entered all the sensitive data the site told me to, only to be presented with an empty order. It is still unclear to me whether my card will be charged or not as I clicked the OK (or whatever it was called) button to proceed with the transaction, but I have not received any details about how and where to download the album. Needless to say I did not try again as I do not want to be charged several times for something I might not even get. Yes, charged - I told them I'd pay 5 UKP for the album. Not a lot but a lot more than they'd get through the label...
I have not downloaded the album in any other way yet. There might be others with the same experience out there who decided that the hassle of going through the official channel was not worth the effort - a regular P2P download is still a lot easier.
--frank[at]unternet.org
As a Brit, I'm curious as to how your RIAA (which comes over as a pretty damn scary organization) regulate copyright protection on non-US labels/media, and in particular this case where the songs are effectively being given away. Do they bother with non-US stuff at all?
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
I see plenty of speculation about the number of downloads, the number of purchasers, and how much they're spending, but absolutely nothing from any credible source. I'm waiting to hear what the band say the figures are, perhaps sometime next year.
It's probably not wise to assume that each download is a lost sale though. A lot of people are going to grab it now for free and pay for it later, so they get it at higher than 160kbps, or in OGG/APE etc.
Radiohead refused to release their music anywhere but their own web site. None of the major stores, physical or digital have access to it yet. And the 800lb gorilla of digital sales, iTunes, will never have access to it as long as Apple demands customers be allowed to download at least some tracks ala carte while Radiohead demands their music be sold only in full albums.
On the other hand, their music was presumably available as usual at all the normal pirate hang outs.
This isn't rocket science folks.
On another note, I do have to wonder about the context of the sensationalized claim that "more copies of the album were pirated than [legally] downloaded". Isn't that true for practically _every_ album released in the last decade?
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
In order to get it from radiohead's site you must enter your personal information, even when you aren't paying, so many people don't have the time to fill the form or simply don't want to.
If I and 6 others download a full album off of radiohead's site, radiohead has to pay for the bandwidth. If I download it from radiohead's site(as I was about to do; I have hatched a plan with kurzweilfreak(am I confusing you with someone else?) to get their box set with vynil in the not too distant future, may as well hear what it sounds like first) --- and then upload it to 6 others, the result is pretty much exactly the same, only they save themselves some money. How is this piracy, exactly -- I'm saving radiohead money?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The article clearly states that the number of pirated copies was less than half that of non-pirated copies... Why such a blatant mistake?
Anyways, I didn't pirate it because my friend put it on my USB stick for me (fair use).
I'm glad they (supposedly) found a way to cut out the middleman, though. The more money that goes to the creators, the better. If I wasn't a poor student, I would be glad to give them some.
I guess they'll just have to wait till they go on tour near where I live.
Hell, with the new comment system, I might stop entirely, but that's another story.
:P
:P
The fact is, we're a bunch of geeks, Radiohead is a single band, and I don't recall seeing this story anywhere *but* Slashdot.
Chances are, people downloading the album from other sources simply don't *know* that the band is doing a 'name your own price' deal. Oh - yes, I know, 'But fans! Fans!'
Fans my arse - the last time I visited a band website was approximately two years ago
Now, who are these EMI folks, and why are they making scary amounts of sense? I recognize the name, but it comes with the horror of 'label' attached. Can it be, from the city of the fallen, we have one of the faithful?
...if a lot of people "pirated" it, as long as enough people pay for it. Since they are selling direct, one person who coughs up $5.00 is akin to probably 100 people buying an RIAA CD, as far as money in Radiohead's pocket goes. They could have TONS of unpaid for copies circulating, and still make more than selling CDs through the media cartel.
This space available.
The other day I read that their project was going well, so i figured i'd back it up. Bought the downloads for 10 pounds. Having purchased a bit of music online as of late, that has had me burn, then rip music, just to make it play on my W900i, i welcome their DRM free approach. I hope this initiative moves things in the right direction.
;)
On the topic of the SE Walkman phone.. are any of you guys having trouble with the cable interface. Mine's getting loose and ive had it for a year and a half (as far as i recall). I love being able to listen to music on my phone, and not having to worry about overhearing calls.. but having to worry about a cable that falls out - that kind of spoils it.
Just my two cents - well 10 pounds
- Mad, ingenous - they've both left you puzzled -
Quote from article:
Actually, this demonstrates some problems with the approach: for instance, it adds yet another place one needs to look for content. Whether good or not, the Pirate Bay successfully consolidates where one looks for media.
No need to look all over the place. I haven't tried to purchase the release, but I wonder what sort of server they are running. Could it handle the traffic? Bittorrent might be the logical approach.
Maybe they should have released directly to bittorrent with a 5 second "share-sic" ad before each song that said to buy it at "name your cost" prices on the website to remove the ad (naturally, anyone would figure out how to get rid of the ad, I just think that if they established themselves as the primary tracker for their music, others wouldn't bother, so at least they'd get their message out).
Of course, they could have given a free license to the whole thing, and said "screw copyrights!"
Also, long term profits/concert tickets/publicity/etc. will have to be calculated before evaluating their experiment from a capitalist/profit perspective.
... about piracy of albums that weren't released with a user-pricing model? I want to know how many times other albums are downloaded comapared to purchased.
I know that Trent Reznor has publicly stated that he knows his latest album, Nine Inch Nails' 'Year Zero' was pirated a lot, and that he was happy people were listening to it, but unhappy about the albums pricing schemes and that he himself (and the musicians, audio engineers, etc. who made the album) didn't get much money from the album.
I'll bet Radiohead get more money from this than any of their other albums, despite the fact that the total amount of money made may be lower...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur. . . . . . . .
In my mind, the real test of how successful this experiment is depends entirely on the total amount of money ultimately made, not how many legal downloads (with zero or non-zero price paid), not how many bittorrent downloads, not even the average amount paid. If the band's take is higher or equal to their last album I think you can say it was a success. The key thing is that with the record companies out of the loop, you would probably only need to pull in about $1-2 per legal download to match a traditional album release in terms of money going directly to the band, assuming there were as many paid downloads as would otherwise have been CD sales.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
The moment I heard about this, I gave them 5 pounds and got myself on the pre-order list. Then when the 10th rolled around, I got an email with a link to my copy and it worked painlessly. I applaud Radiohead for this bold move, I've been saying for years that this is how it should be done. This was the first album I've paid for in years. Thank you Radiohead for ushering in the beginning of the end for the big record labels and all of their douchebaggery.
Personally, I was kind of turned off of downloading it from their site, as it requires registration with the site that handles the "order".. I doubt I'll ever use it again, and I just don't want yet another password to keep track of. And I'd kind of like to avoid entering that personal info, though it's not that big of a deal..
I'd rather get it "for free" from somewhere else if I could.
(What's with, after clicking "pay now", the artificial "YOU ARE CURRENTLY IN A QUEUE" that is just a pre-set delay before going to the next page? It appears to just be some simple javascript, apparently not based on any actual... queue.
And having Mobile Phone with an asterisk next to it, like name and address, etc., but home phone does not? I guess I'd just enter 'NONE' for mobile phone number, or 555-5555.)
Convenience.
Users who are savvy enough to download torrents are more like to go the torrent route ANYWAY, even if the music is offered "free" from the musicians site, simply because it's far more convenient. No registration, no waiting in line, and while the bandwidth was fine for me -- downloaded from Radiohead's site at 1000k/sec, out of curiosity -- torrenting likely would have been much quicker (from start to finish). As if those reason's weren't enough, I'd hazard a guess that many torrent users appreciate the sense of "community", in sharing files for other users. Not all, but I'd say there is an element of "honor among theives"... sharing files to a good ratio for the average torrent user.
And, if you're curious, I didn't pay anything to Radiohead for this album because I never do buy CDs until I've listened to an album a half-dozen times and decide I like the music enough to buy it, which I usually do (used from eBay/Amazon). Sadly, this album did nothing for me and I promptly deleted it after one half-hearted attempt to get through the entire thing (sorry Radiohead fans). Still, KUDOS to the band for going this route, despite the nay-sayers.
Ask Jonathan Coulton if the model works.
Or maybe the guys at Magnatune.
They still seem pretty sold on it.
I pirated it because forbidden fruit is sooo much sweeter.
I know - I know, off topic rant,
but for some reason I see red when marketspeak types use that word.
Hint Try googling digitalization:
Did you mean: digitization
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
I'm inclined to believe they've already made more money than they would have received from the label. As you see reading the posts, some paid 1$, some paid 5 pounds, some bought the 80$ version...
They probably would have made in the best case scenario 0.8-1.2$ from a CD through the label (so much only because they're famous and can negotiate better deals).
Also consider the transaction fee of 0.45, from which about 0.2 is probably going directly in their pocket...
The Radiohead's website was serving so many downloads it was taking hours to download. I know personally people that went paid some money and then hit up a torrent. OR they have bought the box set, and hit the torrents as it was faster and freed up some bandwidth for those that have no clue there are faster ways of getting it.
FTA: "Over the following days, the file was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day--adding up to more than 500,000 total illegal downloads.
/. abstract come from? Seriously, wha?
That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com."
So, where does the alternate interpretation in the
And that's where I stopped, at the enter the sensitive data part. Why not use Paypal? Having to register with yet another online entity - secure.xurbiaxendless.com - is a definite turn-off.
It's too bad, my girlfriend is a big radiohead fan and wanted it for her birthday. She got the new Feist album instead. I'll wait for the plastic disc to turn up in the stores.
I don't care why you're posting AC
First of all, TFA says no such thing as the summary.
Second, Radiohead reports taking an average sales price of around $8/album, even factoring in the people offering $0.00 for it.
Third, Radiohead gets that whole $8, minus hosting (promotion and engineering always come out of the artists' share of the pie anyway). That makes this a wildly successful endeavor, considering that your typical top-40 artist makes the equivalent of an upper middle class income (in the $200k range, IIRC).
As a disclaimer, I don't personally care for radiohead (though I can stand one or two of their "sellout popular" songs). But as an experiment, this one shook the music industry like an 18 month old baby.
"You will be annihili .. annihiliga .. ann .. damn ! WHO wrote this script ?! A 5 year old ???"
Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah on ending sequence in Star Control 2.
Read radical news here
Why didn't they just put a torrent tracker on the official site? The bandwidth overload problem is _exactly_ what BT was designed to solve.
...the site was so slow that purchasing the album was impossible. And fans just wanted to listen to the music.
Maybe it's because there were significant download delays. For people who weren't going to pay anyway $0 $0 + hassle. And Radiohead should be happy; they didn't have to pay for the download bandwidth of freeloaders.
The problem was caused by the record labels themselves.
Anytime you have something that people want, and you do not give them a legitimate market to get it, a black market will develop.
Ten years ago, technology advanced to the point that you could distribute music digitally. By denying a legitimate means of digital distribution of music from the market for so long, the music labels essentially ENCOURAGED a black market in digital music to develop. That means that 10 years later, there are mature digital distribution methods and massive amounts of consumers who know how to use them. If, instead, the labels had just charged a reasonable rate 10 years ago, these illegitimate means of distribution would not have developed nearly as much.
So when consumers have the option of a free song from Radiohead's site, and a free song from the same place they're getting all of their other free music, why bother going to the Radiohead site?
paintball
And then the artist gets half the cost of the DVD or CD on average.
But if it's name your cost, some people might have thought free.
Besides, even free is not free - you pay a TAX for music copying and artist recompense on every blank CD-R/W or DVD-R/W you buy.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I wanted to encourage them, and to send a message to other musicians that offerring music for direct download will definitely benefit them.
I compose for and play the piano, and offer my recordings for free download from my website - see my sig. I get a couple thousand downloads a month. My aim in offerring my music for free is to build up a fan base, so that in a few years, when I start playing professionally, there will be lots of people who know my music and will be tickets to my concerts.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
You could easily enter fake information and a throwaway email.
I'm a strong proponent of fair use, meaning I fight against any attempt to eliminate the user's right to make a backup copy or do time-shifting of broadcast content. I donate to EFF and write my congresscritters.
But having your friend copy his paid-for album onto your USB stick isn't fair use in any sense that I understand (legal or ethical).
If they end up making more money off this album than if they had released it through traditional means I would say that would be an attractive means of distribution.
True.
The average beginning artist makes somewhere between 1 and 4 cents per CD (usually 0.01 to 0.02 USD). An established artist can get around $2.00 per CD.
If they got $8.00 per download they were wildly successful, even if 0.01 UDS (1 cent) was the cost to distribute it.
Just do the very very simple math.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Upon reading that Radiohead was allowing folks to set their own price for the download, I went to their website and paid £2 (with their service charge it came out to $4.99). The registration was somewhat intrusive (they want your phone number, but I falsified that part). The songs are in 160kbps and downloaded quickly. I didn't see any other comments on here saying "It works", so count this one as proof.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I think this and Apple's iTunes success stories indicate something that the record companies have never thought about. It's not that--outside of a very small number of people--that people want to pirate music. What they want is convenience: the convenience to download it and load it on their favorite device with little hassle.
What people in the music industry and the software development industries forget is that inconvenience is as much a price to pay as is actual money. Different people may place a different monetary amount on inconvenience than others may--but it's still just as much a price to pay. And from the sounds of it, it was more convenient to pirate Radiohead's music than it was to simply go to their web site and offer to pay nothing for the music.
Apple's iTunes has become quite successful because it has proved that for a sizeable percentage of the population, the convenience of point, click, buy, sync to player without the associated hassles around getting the right driver to work or setting up some weird subscription thingy is worth the $0.99 (in the US) per track. I bet you if Radiohead had some convenient distribution mechanism that was exceedingly easy for people to use--even easier to use than BitTorrant--then people would have happily paid $10 for the album.
I think this illustrates a larger trend: making things easy to use (that is, making them convenient) will be worth more and more money to people as they come to realize there is a choice. Any company which fails to make something easy to use or easy to buy or easy to play with will find itself squashed either by companies who 'get it', or by pirates who bypass the little inconveniences that groups like the RIAA insist upon imposing on us.
Like most musicians' websites, the In Rainbows site (http://www.inrainbows.com) sucks. It's confusing and ugly and doesn't feel like the web at all. It'd take me half the time to get the file from some BitTorrent site. I would actually pay for it, but their site scared me away. No way am I putting my credit card number into that. :)
If they made it a bit less quirky, they'd probably tilt the numbers a bit. Probably not enough to bring piracy down to zero, but a lot of people do not feel good about piracy and would prefer something that felt legit.
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, available from Packt Publishing.
I don't know why nobody mentioned that the radio head album was down most of the first day. I tried to download it then and couldn't get a copy. It certainly must have skewed the numbers if the server goes down the day of the big launch.
I can't possibly be the only one in the world who still loves to collect the physical medium? I'd like to have a CD copy of the album with a plastic case and everything. And, I don't need the 2 LPs nor do I have the $80 for discbox - So come on guys, give me CD to buy!
Was there an option for them to pay me to listen?
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
So when consumers have the option of a free song from Radiohead's site, and a free song from the same place they're getting all of their other free music, why bother going to the Radiohead site?
Also: If you're going to download it for $0, why chew up the bandwidth the band is paying for?
(Unless they ask you to do it that way because the bump in the download stats is worth more to the band than the hosting costs for the download.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I downloaded the song "someplace else" because I didn't want to give away my email and wait for an activation code, and the servers were overwhelmed anyway...
I wouldn't count this as "piracy".
I tried to download the album for free from their site, but encountered one of the worst user interfaces I've ever seen on a web page. When I finally figured out how to get to the part where I can download, it asked for a credit card (to pay for my $0 album). All in all it would be *WAY* easier to get a pirated copy. I wonder if that's what's going on.
What would really be impressive is if the "pirate" version was something better than the 160Kbps MP3 download version... Of course, that would scream "inside job", or at least "industrial sabotage" to me.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The real question isn't "ratio of pay to free", but "amount of profit made compared to last radio head album". Or even just "amount of profit made at all".
When I tried to get the album the first day inrainbows.com offered the download, the site was slow as hell and throwing errors all over the place...
So I ended up getting it elsewhere because I'm impatient and wanted to listen to it that night.
However, I returned the next night to buy it and was pleasantly surprised at the speed and ease of the transaction. Well done Radiohead.
using System.Awesome;
Yesterday the Globe and Mail reported (estimated - it was not entirely clear based on what) that in the FIRST day, radiohead grossed ten million dollars.
I hope they're right.
What did it cost to set up that webpage? Well, it must have been essentially nothing. Bandwidth costs also almost nothing (even $50,000.00 would count as almost nothing in this context).
Of course, the band had to spend many hours in the studio getting their music to the (almost incredible) level of perfection they are known for. But, I kind of think they enjoyed that part.
This looks like the most profitable business in the world!
I just want to know who the dumbass is who seeded the torrent of the album.
It should have been tracks that said "Go to radioheads website to get this for free and show the RIAA you hate them, then download it again from every computer you have access to"
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
I was going to download it, I was even going to pay.
However, the site requires you to enter your name, address, email address, and if I remember correctly also your phone number. Because of this, I looked for a privacy policy but couldn't find one. Therefore no sale. I'm still waiting for them to reply to my email on the subject.
I also found the website didn't really work reliably... various elements not loading, and sometimes saying it was only available for pre-order. I also failed to spot the "view basket" button so initially couldn't work out why it told me I could only buy one copy.. when I hadn't yet bought a copy at all.
Given that the download was at a low bitrate, especially for a purchased product, it was guaranteed to be pirated. They really only saw the download as a promotion for the CD, not as a new business model approach. Radiohead never intended to allow people to download a full 320 kbps (CD quality) version of their album. They really weren't quite as forward thinking as they were given credit for.
I just brought the album to see how it was encoded. It was in 160kbps CBR, and it appears to have been encoded with LAME 3.93 (which I think was released in 2002). Now I'm sure the pirated copy will be 192kbps VBR encoded with a version of LAME released this year. If I was more of a audiophile I might care more. Maybe the producers should have followed standard scene rules for releasing mp3s.
When I went to the site, all I saw was a flash movie doing a color morph.
If this is some kind of puzzle, I'm not into it. It would not surprise me
to learn that the next step for many people would be to find a torrent.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The actual website to download from was harder to find that it would have been on BitTorrent. The official Radiohead site didn't provide a clear link. The stories I read about it didn't mention where to actually go, again, leaving BitTorrent as the easiest option. But I did find the site eventually, and it was slow and buggy. It took several reload attempts on each page to be able to navigate to the next. This was not the first day it was up, either, so I imagine it was bad for a lot of people. When I finally got to the price box, I was surprised because for some reason I thought I'd be able to try-before-I-buy. Perhaps an unreasonable expectation, but somehow that assumption was built into "name your own price" for me. I don't know what my price is until I've heard it. At that point, I bailed. And before you judge me, I didn't download it elsewhere either. I've yet to get a copy of the album. My thought on this is that it's not just about a good price: you have to provide a great service. They didn't. So the path of least resistance was still to just download it elsewhere for free. iTunes proves people will pay if you give them what they want for a price they can justify. If _either_ of those is missing, you'll fail. The Radiohead album was obviously "the price they want", but the experience was not as seamless as I've become used to with filesharing networks.
Does your significant other love shoes?
All of you music economic gurus out there seem to be ignoring the price that popular non-riaa bands charge for the albums, which is about $10-$12.
..., touch and go, in the red, etc etc etc. all charge right in the range - which is a bit cheaper than the RIAA labels charge, but there is something about that number that the real mid tier players in the market with quality bands and less fat than the major labels seem to charge.
your merge records, goner records, sympathy
You'd think they'd charge less if that was the secret to making more money or if there was another sweet spot on the demand curve.
Back in 2000, Riding the Bullet had pretty much the same thing happen. Download, and be honest and pay up. The community said "Ha", and downloaded anyway.
For all the talk about "donations" and "giving back to the artists"...free seems to trump even a tiny amount of donation money.
The people that wanted the album for free actually saved them the badwitdh, they are kind people not pirates.
Radiohead pretty clearly needs to have a more robust system for handling orders. I paid around $5 for the album and enjoyed it enough to go back to (attempt to) buy the discbox. Sadly my registration information was completely lost, I put off reregistering for a few days to find that the site appears to be non-functional. Still waiting...
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
Apparently a fan has paid more than $1,000 according to this site.
*If Radiohead was making a significant amount of money on album sales with their old label, do you think they would have changed to this new method? Most likely not.*
You obviously don't know Radiohead, do you.
The thing about their model is that I don't yet know how much I want to pay for the music since I've never heard it. I'm willing to pay what I think is fair, but since I don't know if I like it or not, I don't know what that is. I'm not going to pay $10 for something I don't like, and I similarly don't want to pay $1 for something I do. I'll be happy to give them more money after the fact if they'd let me. Right now, I believe that requires me to pay another surcharge to download the songs.
I agree with the quality - I purchased the album (yes, gave Radiohead my money for the album, simply on principle).
But the 160kbs was a disappointment.
I believe that the record companies most likely created the vast number of Torrents of this album to ensure this business model WONT work. If it did work the record companies would go broke VERY quickly.
I would love to know how much money Radiohead have made in the first week.
.
If you put in 0.0 there was no credit card fee. I paid 8USD because I think it's an honor system kind of thing.
The same actually happened to me. After entering payment details, I was returned to a page saying I had an empty basket. No mention of an order number and, as I eventually found out, no confirmation email either. I emailed their support address to confirm whether or not an order had been made, but I never got a response.
After talking with a friend who also bought the album, I realized there were a few more steps beyond the payment page and there should've been a confirmation email. So I assumed my first order didn't take and placed another...
Anyway, it all worked out. But I'm still a little miffed that their order support never got back to me...
I would pay something if I could hear it first but I haven't heard one song on the new album so I am not willing to put in a number. But I am also not downloading the album
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
I just want to know who the dumbass is who seeded the torrent of the album.
Maybe the band did. It would have been a good move to get the load off their site.
What?
Huh? Unless the files came with a license expressly allowing redistribution, then I would think that it is copyright infringement to give a copy to someone else, share them on bit torrent, etc. What price they sold it for is irrelevant. Radiohead are still the copyright holders so only they, or people they give rights to, can redistribute. Now, I don't know if they'd be able to get much from you in court if they sued you over infringement (since they were giving it away), but technically you'd be infringing.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
</sarcastic_tone>
You can't take the sky from me...
I could see this coming
Have any of you been to the Radiohead website?
It gave me an instant headache.
They should pay me for trying to use that site.
Maybe I'll PVP the album and mail them a few bucks, but I'm not going back there.
For the reasons you stated... It's faster, uses less of Radiohead's bandwidth, and I heard the site was down or crawling for the better part of the day. And I know for a fact that some people paid for the CD through the Radiohead site, but downloaded it by torrent instead.
While there are some that pirate out of a sense that the labels are overpriced, generally people tend to pirate works simply because they can get away with it, and its perceived as victimless.
Sort of like the same reason that people deliberately speed a lot of the time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Try downloading all of cnn.com and hosting it somewhere else with your own ads and see whether your legal theory holds up.
It's most definitely infringement of copyright (unless they *also* specifically gave a license to distribute... I haven't checked).
I don't particularly care if people call this theft or not (hanging out in a room in a non-fully-booked hotel without paying, and leaving it in the same state it was in is *still* theft of services, even if no one was deprived of anything), but whatever.
In the United States, the Audio Home Recording Act makes it legal to copy music from a friend.
People who download probably wouldn't by anyways. At least not the full album. People going to the pay sites are people who would pay. And of course there was all of the promotional stuff from third party customers that essentially made a non paying person a paying person for s brief time.
I think the big problem is that they want you to pay for 7 or so songs that basically suck. That seems to be the model nowadays unless you are a new act that has to prove something. but after you proved yourself, you concentrate on one or two songs that would be hit singles, pack whatever garbage you can into an album and let those one or two songs sell it. This is also a reason why big labels are fighting sales of singles. If the had to put as much effort into all the songs as they do for the hits in order to sell them all, they would go broke at current rates. Only hardcore fans of the band or bands style would bother buying the non-hit songs if they weren't bundled.
And yes, they so have singles available. But they tend to be over priced in comparison to an entire album. It has been a while but I think the last single I purchased was around $7 when the entire tape was selling for $10 or $15. But tapes kind of tells you about the last time I purchased music from a store.
It's the same math it's always been - there is nothing magical about it being on the 'net. If you are unknown, you aren't going to make money. Period.
It doesn't matter if the beginning indie artist can make a $1.00/download, rather than $.04/CD - because there aren't going to be twenty five times as much downloads as CD purchases. They'll be lucky as hell if anyone beyond their family, significant others, and a handful of drunks from last nights gig down at the local watering hole ever pay anything. Meanwhile, the beginning indie artist has had to pay cash money for the website (and design), promotion, marketing, etc... Costs paid for the beginning corporate artist by the label.
If you haven't got the demand - you aren't going to make any money, regardless of the percentage of sales you take home.
I was amused about this "Pay what you want" Vs. Bittorrent and hear is what i found: http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/005708.html Anybody download it? And what did it sound like? My guess is if it sucks in sound quality would have people talking to other people and on and on. Word of mouth might have something to do with it. What do you think?
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
isn't important. If they had put a link to a torrent they'd uploaded to The Pirate Bay, same result. In fact, I'd say that's even more forward-thinking than what they did, but either way I get good music for free, so what's the difference?
Please cite the exact section of the Audio Home Recording Act that states this.
I tried to buy if off their site but it was to overloaded with traffic. So, as any extremely excited fan would do, I just downloaded it elsewhere to return another time to 'purchase' it.
One thing very conspicuously absent is "How much does a normal track get illegally spread per legal sale?". They say this one is ~50%. I don't know the biz. Is that good or bad? What is the expected (albeit unwanted I'm sure) figure for a top 100 album? To me, and perhaps it's only callousness, half of listeners doing it legally seems like a smash success. Are there really popular albums (and I'm not saying I listen to many of them) that actually can claim only half of the listeners are doing so illegally? I at least imagine that's a pretty good figure, but either way there should be data to compare to here - compare to what usually happens rather then to nothing.
I typed "decline to state" into the fields I didn't want to fill out, and it worked fine for me.
Seeing as that download is the only way people can get it at the moment I fail to see how torrents could be any better...
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
Not true.
A number of my friends are artists, some solo acts, some in bands.
When they make their own CDs and DVDs and sell them at performances, they get much more than if they use a label.
And nowadays you can make a Facebook or MySpace group for the band and tell everyone where you'll be playing, allowing you to estimate venue size and sellout spaces, and even arrange housing and food for touring.
It's the 21st Century.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I bet what most people are forgetting is that you can say the same about any album, either released as radio head did, or via the traditional CD release. More people are going to download than are going to pay. The question is, did they make more paid for downloads than the number of CDs they would have sold, and did they make more per unit sold. The file sharers aren't paying either way, so there's no point counting them. Just compare which gives the artist more money, CD or pay-what-you-want. Also, some of us just didn't get around to buying the Radiohead album yet. This article just reminded me about the album, so I'm downloading (£2) it now.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
man, what's the world come to when you can't redistribute free sh*t?
I love the abuse of language. yes, it's free and you STOLE it. now pay up.
maybe that predicting the unpredictable computer came up with this....
I never heard of Radiohead until it was mentioned on Southpark. Even then, I never paid it much heed. However, upon finding out that they were offering a "name your price" model, I was curious, and decided to try it for free.
I now have to say it's not my cup of tea. I have no intention of getting any more Radiohead, but I won't be distributing my current downloads either. Perhaps all those people who grabbed it for free are in the same boat?
Yeah, "habit" my ass - have you seen that website?
Half the time nothing loaded, and even when it did, I had a really hard time trying to figure out what the hell it wanted from me. (I do want to give them some money, once I get past their website)
Incidentally, do they really give a crap if people "pirate" their free downloads? It seems like the point of the exercise was to get some people to pay for it, which seems to be working pretty well (last figure I was was $8 average for the downloads, including the $0 ones).
sic transit gloria mundi
There's good coverage of the Audio Home Recording Act at Wikipedia addressing the issue. The law does explicitly include a very broad exemption for non-commercial personal digital and audio recording activities. As is typical, it is arguable whether this case is indeed fully protected by the ARHA, but a court ruling appears to indicate that it is, and Senate testimony on the bill explicitly says it is intended to cover examples such as making a non-commercial copy to give a family member. A copy given to a personal friend would also fall under a "personal non-commercial" clause that would cover giving it to a family member.
So yeah, it does appear to be noninfringing under US law.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
That surprises me. I had assumed the info had to match the billing address your credit card company has on file, to verify you are who you say you are. There I go, dreaming again I suppose.
I would be interested in seeing whether you will be permitted to continue buying from this online retailer (assuming they have anything else to sell) or if they will suspend your account once they notice you declined to provide your info.
I don't care why you're posting AC
They allowed me to download for 0.00 and fake info all around.
I am not a RH fan so I didn't get this album buy any method, but if I was interested, I would go download it elsewhere and decide if I liked it. If I did, I would then go to their site and buy it. How can I judge what to pay, if I don't know what I am getting? If a band I like does this, I am on board.
A few months back I saw an older game at the store I thought about buying. I downloaded it instead, played it, verified it wouldn't make me ill (motion sick problems with some games) and that it seemed like a good game. I then went out and bought the game. I haven't installed it though, because it contains copy protection annoyances that the downloaded version doesn't.
Counting downloads as lost sales doesn't make any sense. Some people are downloading to try it. Some others are pathological collectors who will download everything whether they even care about what they are downloading. What number of people downloading from BT are actually RH fans, who want this album, but don't want to pay for it? I don't know.
what article fails to mention is the very simple fact that even though this "album" has been released on the internet, radiohead also announced last week they are releasing this album on cd with an extra 7-8 tracks. so even if people paid for this album, if they are a radiohead fan they are going to have to fork out more money to get those additional tracks. so realistically, this was nothing but a marketing ploy.
Well, interesting option for experiment mark 2.
Would be to seed the torrent as a full album bundle.
But include a small payment widget.
Not nagware but friendly like.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
I'm actually not a huge Radiohead fan, although I did like some of their earlier stuff. Therefore, I very much doubt I would have bothered to pirate their Album at any point in time. However, after reading here about their novel approach to marketing and sales, I DID go and pay to download their album, and am listening to it right now. If those on here who are constantly complaining about RIAA and the music industry in general were really serious about wanting to switch to a better model, they'd be doing the same. We can all afford $5! Even if you only pay $2, it's still more, even after bandwidth and hosting charges, than they would get from a "label" contract. All true nerds and music buffs should be downloading their album RIGHT NOW, whether you're a fan of their music or not! Let's support the open-music model, if nothing else.
Aren't these the same idiots who said SCO was going to win?
Forbes is like the Weekly World News but dressed in a suit.
you rock mc ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd love to see the data on what everyone paid. Just a big list of dollar amounts in a text file. It'd be interesting just to histogram it and see how many people paid each price. I'd bet on a big spike around 5 GBP, but I wonder how many paid more than $100?
As big a Radiohead fan as I am, I impatiently downloaded the torrent about a week ago. The album is great, so I went to the site to plunk down my 5 quid. I'm not sure removing the torrent download with the one from radiohead.com does anything for me, but it feels a lot better in principle.
I gotta have more cowbell.
I paid 1p which through some magical fees, translated into about $1. I'd say that it is worth about 1p, but not worth $1.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Their web site was stalled due to traffic. So I downloaded it from the usual places. I think it's a decent album, and I plan to pay them something soon. Probably on the order of $15... $10 for the art, plus a 50% tip for thinking outside the box.
For $0.00
I had never heard anything by Radiohead before, so I figured that any financial gain they would get would be a result of the exposure I was granting them by downloading their album.
Good thing for me, too, because it sucked.
At least I gave it a listen, though. That's more than what any other band I've never heard of gets.
Their site was butt-ugly (WAY too colorful), and had a really awkward interface. It's like they went out of their way to confuse people, hoping that they would give them more money than non-confused people. It just made me wary to give them any financial info, given that the site looked like it was from geocities in 1997.
A while ago, Harvey Danger (also a band I had never heard of) put an album up on their site. They provided ZIP over http/ftp or a higher bitrate OGG/ZIP over bittorrent. I still listen to it occasionally.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
who the dumbass is who seeded the torrent of the album
Someone who works for the RIAA trying to prove that downloadable music in a non-DRM format is only going to be pirated. Thanks to all those who are helping prove the point.
To try to counter, I've just bought the thing for $5 although I don't think I know any of this band's work but I have heard the name. I'm willing to support this experimental distribution method, though. Anyway, it's downloading at a reasonable clip. Oh, and be warned, they charged me 45 pence for a credit card transaction fee... reasonable I suppose. Now my bank will hit me for a foreign exchange fee too probably. Maybe the band could find someone among their fans who could have set up a better e-commerce site for a discount rate.
Now I haven't either downloaded the album via bit torrent or via the radiohead site, but I can understand why people haven't got it from their site. For starters I haven't heard the album so I'm not going to just put in any random figure and buy it, I also don't want to put in $0. What they really need is some samples of the songs on the site. Also the site says nowhere that it is secure, I told my friend that you didn't actually have to pay anything if you didn't want to, now he has no problems with paying but didn't want to enter in his credit card details which is fair enough. He just downloaded it via bit torrent for this reason. They need more payment options like paypal or something similar, after all not everyone has a credit card and they need make it clear that the site is secure.
Would be to seed the torrent as a full album bundle.
But include a small payment widget.
Not nagware but friendly like.
What's wrong with "here's a link to the official download torrent", followed by "if you want to send us some money because you like us or our music, use this <paypal/CC/etc> link".
They can still track how many people downloaded it through the tracker stats, and those who were going to pay any non-zero amount (rather than typing 0 in the box) are still going to. They could even require registration to get on the torrent if they wanted (hey - it works for private trackers right?). And, there wouldn't be any queue or high bandwidth costs.
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
I have no way of hearing this new album before I buy it. I will not buy it until I can at least hear the 30-second samples that other online stores offer. I have limited bandwidth to be downloading entire albums just to find out if I like them or not.
Also- What format is the album in? What bitrate?
I haven't heard anyone on here say anything about the actual _music_. This business model is not sustainable.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I forgot to prepay for the album, so on the day it was released I tried to pay but found their payment server overwhelmed and could not get through. I found the album somewhere else and downloaded it. A couple days later I went back to their site and paid them the $5 I was going to originally pay them. So I paid them for the album and saved them the bandwidth cost.
How can you pirate something that can be legally had for free? They might be using a different (probably more convenient) source than the one provided by the artists. But to say it is pirated is to disregard the denotation of the word.
I bet lots of people never heard the news about Radiohead's free album before finding it listed on their favorite w4r3z site and yoinking it. People find metaproviders they like, content aggregators, and stick with them. In this case many have pirate sources as their aggregators.
Give it time. As more and more artists let loose their songs, you'll see sites specializing in providing news and links to those resources, and people will add these new metaproviders to their visit-often list.
I put in 0 dollars because I haven't heard it yet... Why should I pay $$ before I even know what I'm getting?
If I like it, I'll go back, they have an ID and Password, and then I'll buy it, but not without hearing it... and the site seemed broken at least links were missing images, etc...
So, now it is between me, radiohead, and my God... Hope it sounds good.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Same experience here. I know they're doing the whole "independent thing" with this release, but maybe Radiohead should have let someone else code the website... you know like someone who is a web developer... and not high.
The law does explicitly include a very broad exemption for non-commercial personal digital and audio recording activities...A copy given to a personal friend would also fall under a "personal non-commercial" clause that would cover giving it to a family member.
If this were indeed the case, then couldn't you use this as a defense against the RIAA's lawsuits? Also, it's interesting that references 12, 13, and 14 in the Wikipedia article all refer to a certain Senate report, but when you try to follow the links, they only say "insert" in the references list. It's almost as if this Senate report doesn't really exist.
.... which have this nasty characteristic of being dead easy to copy, is an idiotic business model.
Music in digital format will only be an advertising medium for the real deal: live music, which thankfully will bring back the social and cultural dimension to the art that was so completely lost in the last 20 years.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You could always download it for 0 pounds and get the link, and then wait and see if a charge showed up on your credit card. If not, you could still go on there any pay them later if you feel so inclined.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I didn't like their distribution model. I'm not a fan of this internet-only distribution model, because if it were to become ubiquitous, the music industry would be shafting a significant number of people. The distribution model also relies on guilt, a fact of which I'm also not a fan. I decided that the best way to subvert that guilt was to pay what they were asking for.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
That's not true! This story only serves to perpetuate the myth that people steal music without paying for it. If the music was free, then no one would have to steal it, so this story must be false.
- RMS
Fan: And if I want to pay nothing.
Radiohead: Sure.
Fan: What's this costing you, then?
Radiohead: A few pounds or so for the electricity and such. Oh, a couple pence in bandwidth per download.
Fan: So, if someone gives you zero, you lose a couple pence on the sale?
Radiohead: Yeah, pretty much, but whatever, right? One sale'll make up for it.
Fan: Here, let me give you a hand. I'll put it on the P2P, and the folks who weren't going to pay for it anyways will get it, but won't suck up your bandwidth.
Radiohead:Thanks ma--
Forbes: AHA WE CAUGHT YOU YOU PUSS-SWEATING KNEE-RAPING PIRATE!!!!!!!1!
And that, folks, is the death of journalism.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
they're a little overhyped in the mainstream press, but they really are quite good.
The site was way too slow so a friend gave me his copy.
I can see how Radiohead would be successful with such a thing, but I wonder what would happen if Kidz Bop used this technique of "name-your-own-price".
Because, after all, it's for the children! WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!
Using an average cost of 0.75c per GB of bandwidth, those 500,000 free downloads from P2P sources saved Radiohead $18,750.00 in bandwidth costs. So this is a GOOD thing. If people want something for nothing, let them get it somewhere where it won't punish the band for their generosity!
(assumptions: Album contained 10 songs at 5mb per song)
Increasing the percentage of people who didn't pay Radiohead is serving the RIAA interest, I think. Encouraging people to buy it, is more likely to get more artists to bypass the current music publishing industry. Vote with your dollars.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
they've made an absolute fortune already, and the sense I get from every interview they've done and song they've written in the past 10 years is that they are artists who are not interested particuarly in financial success.
I really don't think Radiohead expected to make more from the download then from regular record sales. It's an acknowledgment that there is no longer any value in the digital music file.
The mp3 is now being used as a promotional tool for the band. Building the brand and then selling other things that can be attached to it.
Will they make more money then if everyone bought a copy for $19.99. No way. That time has passed, technology gave musicians the ability to sell music, and now technology is taking it away. Bands will still make money, but not nearly as much as before.
And I'm not sure if thats a bad thing.
Oh? Say whatever you want but real infringement of rights have some form of consequence in the real world. And creating duplicates of something that was initially free of cost, except in a purely (outdated) legal sense, does not. The only thing that the torrenters have done to radiohead on this album is screwed with their stats. And it looks like they have the stats anyway; so what does it matter? The whole point of laws that right private wrongs like this is when the private wrongs actually have consequence. Radiohead will never know one way or another whether or not I'm just trolling and making all this up; nor will anyone else especially once I get the hirez vynil. What radiohead *will* know is their bank account will be more full, since
a) since the ISP will not charge them as much as they could have been charged
b) another box set is sold
and I'm pretty sure they, the copyright holders, have nothing wrong with *that*.
Oh and forgot the second part; my computer died during the next week or so. Now I don't think I even have the original file, so it's unclear whether I dreampt the whole thing(ie, not only does it probably not affect radiohead, but it doesn't seem to affect me either. A thousandth of a square inch on a hard drive platter had a different magnetic encoding than it would have otherwise had, that's about it- I haven't heard the album yet). So who does it affect? Other torrenters? Perhaps; but the affect of any one person in a torrent cloud is so utterly minimal, once the cloud gets beyond a certain size. I may have saved someone a minute or two of downloading time, that's about it. Where's the consequence? Prove there's some sort of a meaningful consequence here and I'll buy a solid copy of "OK Computer".
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I exited my browser at that point because I didn't want to wait, and no, I didn't go looking elsewhere (maybe my kids will) for the same content. I really don't care, just looking, really.
What I wonder, is if non-zero amounts "jump the queue", so to speak? Not that I blame them if that is the case, in fact, I would advertise and explain it that way - "free, wait your turn, pay, you get faster service..."
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
P2P is mostly between anonymous peers, not actual friends.
even if they got paid nothing from 90% of the downloaders, they would still a) be increasing their exposure and audience, and b) be relatively better off than if they'd sold the through "conventional" means like CD. Typically a major artist would see 4~5% of the cover price of a CD in royalties. For smaller artists, well they'd be lucky to see 2%. At least with Radiohead et al's model, the artist gets to keep almost 100% of the money. It's not piracy that record companies should really fear, it's artists cutting them out of the picture altogether.
I paid 5 GBP for the album, but my download code was a bit late. I downloaded the album off of a sendspace link on a message board when I saw that people had already gotten their download code and I had yet to receive mine. Does this make me a pirate? Why should source even matter? Whether I paid 5GBP, 0, or 100 to inrainbows.com, why should it matter where I downloaded the album from? It's the same digital information.
The server was flooded when I first found out about the album so I downloaded aka "pirated" it elsewhere.
The 10 hours later, when the thing wasn't getting slammed I bought it for the same price as you'd pay on itunes. You can't steal information, and in this case especially. You either have it or you don't. So, make it convenient with ample bandwidth, and other venues won't be easier to use.
I called resource capitalism. Information brokers should understand that in a free market you compete with others. While it's true more than 2x the people pirated the album, it's also true that these same people purchased it. And one of those people is me.
The site was unavailable for long periods of time, or if it was up it had a slow response. I tried purchasing the album a week or so after it first came out, and it took me about half the night to do so. At first the site was down a few times, then a few hours later I came back and it was slow. I managed to slowly crawl to the checkout only to be presented with tons of validation errors. So, I come back a few hours later and am finally able to check out after about 10 tries. I don't think it has much to do with the letting people pick their own price. The problem is the system they used was absolutely terrible. But, I'm sure that little fact will get buried by the record labels.
Here's the thing. I put 0 for the price because I didn't know radiohead and, to be honest, I'm going to back into their back ctaalog and get other stuff. The disc is really good.
I actually did buy the album through their website, but the site was poorly laid-out (you had to click "preorder" to download the album) and slow as hell on the day of the release. It took like ten minutes for the download page to load for me, and I talked to one or two people for whom it didn't load at all. And although I actually paid like five bucks, if I was gonna pay zero, I wouldn't see any moral downside to skipping the hassle downloading it via a torrent. (Hell, if anything you're doing Radiohead a server by reducing their bandwidth costs.)
It doesn't apply very well to an e-commerce store, where people have certain expectations, but it was innovative for a band's website. The uniqueness of it is the only reason I can recall it after all these years.
I was going to pay few dollars but then the news came out that tracks were encoded at 160k. So I got it from a tracker, listened once and trashed it. I'm not paying for sub-radio quality crap, no matter how good the artist is.
Radiohead should be ashamed of themselves.
Do you honestly think the RIAA needs to prove that people will take for free instead of paying? It's not really ever been in doubt. Lots of people are greedy for entertainment. It's only unrealistic places like Slashdot that try to propagate the myth that it's somehow noble.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Uh, the fact is that the official download site was slammed the day that it came out, so I (and others I assume) got it from other sources. Regardless of the "choose-your-price" thing, I am sure that most people would have done that anyway. I don't think it has anything to do with people not "fully understanding" Radiohead's new content delivery scheme.
Why would I pay for a recording, period?* I can record it off the radio. Or I can borrow the CD from the library and make a much nicer copy. I'll completely ignore the tax on digital recorders and media and focus on the hardware and software that is designed to do this very thing and is openly advertised as being a major reason to buy. At the end of the day, the "official" recording does not offer me anything over what the free one does, and quite frankly, I couldn't care less about the crap they try to add to albums. I just want to hear the song. What I will happily pay for, OTOH, is a live performance, because watching a recording of that just isn't the same thing.
*~200 CDs in my collection before I stopped buying music several years ago.
On NPR last Friday I heard the album was downloaded over a million times with an average price of $8.00
Thats $8,000,000 for Radiohead, their producer, and the web hoster. I don't know what record contracts are like these days, but they probably made more in the first week then the they would in a year under contract.
If this were indeed the case, then couldn't you use this as a defense against the RIAA's lawsuits?
No, anonymous P2P does not fall under private usage. Copyright law and rulings explicitly distinguish your personal circle of social relationships - family friends coworkers and other social contacts. For example playing your DVD of Star Wars on a giant screen at a wedding reception with a couple hundred people is "private" usage, not a "public performance".
it's interesting that references 12, 13, and 14 in the Wikipedia article all refer to a certain Senate report, but when you try to follow the links, they only say "insert" in the references list.
I just looked at the page history, the references were *all* blank just a week ago. Someone is in the middle of doing a bang-up job building a reference list where none existed at all before.
I personally have no doubt that particular reference will be filled in with the Senate record saying what the article says it says. I am somewhat familiar with the Audio Home Recording Act, and yes the deal at the time was that congress was going to give the recording industry all the crazy stuff they wanted in the law in exchange for a broad statement officially clarifying that general consumer audio devices and common private noncommercial activities using those devices were immune from copyright infringement lawsuits.
From the recording industry's point of view they were practically getting a free lunch. They had never sued non-commercial home users, had no desire to sue non-commercial home users, didn't expect to ever sue non-commercial home users, and they knew that what the public was supposedly "getting" in the deal they generally already possessed under Fair Use.
And in a classic case of "be careful what you wish for", the recording industry was granted the insane demands they wanted. Congress declared that Audio Home Recording devices needed to contain a specific DRM system dictated by the recording industry. And remember this was back before the DMCA and before anyone even came up with the term DRM.
The law forced all audio home recording devices to be built with the recording industry's crap DRM system built in, and it completely exterminated the market for all new products and exterminated all new technology. It exterminated the DAT and the MiniDisc and all new technology for a decade. Nobody bought the recording industry's defective DAT machines, no one bought the recording industry's defective MiniDisc machines, and of course that means no one went (re)buying their music on DAT no one went (re)buying their music on MiniDisc or in any other format. The recording industry got what they demanded and they effectively exterminated progress in audio technology after the CD, and killed their own sales when people didn't replace their CD's with the newest best formats. The recording industry got what they demanded, and shot themselves in the foot with their stupidity.
They exterminated all progress in audio technology up until the MP3 player. The MP3 player effectively slipped through a loophole in the AHRA. The MP3 player was not an "Audio Recording Device" and didn't fall under the recording industry's legislated technology-destroying control. The MP3 player also stored software on its media, and thus fell under the 'general computing device' classification, and thus was not subject to the recording industry's technology controls. The MP3 player is the first new audio technology that was not exterminated, for exactly the reason that it is the only one to dodge the AHRA bullet.
Ok, I went off on a bit of a tangent there. But as I said, I specifically have a bit of familiarity with the AHRA. Yes, Congress was giving a pretty sweeping protection to home recording activities, and yes legislators had specifically contemplated things like the common activity of a kid in highschool giving a romantic mix tape to his girlfriend, and NO congress did not want that kid to ever get dragged into court on copyrigh
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"Under the Audio Home Recording Act [wikipedia.org], a levy (tax) is paid for every "digital audio recording device", and "digital audio recording media"
That wouldn't apply to Computer CD/DVD burners nor their media. The two most used to commit piracy.
"This fund was intended to compensate musicians, and the (often) parasites who feed on them, for the extra losses that would be incurred due to the added piracy enabled by digital technology. In exchange, said digital technology was given legal protection, with the exemption:"
The technology providers may be protected much like gun companies are protected, but that doesn't mean that you or I can't be charged with a crime using said guns.
"Basically, his point was this - if he's paying royalties on every player, recorder, and blank music cd he buys to compensate for the piracy he is assumed to commit, then shouldn't he have the right to commit said piracy? In other words, if you are going to be punished for a crime whether you commit it or not, then why should you be punished again when you actually do?"
An interesting moral principle to live by. According to slashdot, I'm presumed to be guilty instead of innocent in the eyes of the law. Therefore there are a whole host of acts I should be doing since I'm defacto guilty of all of them. Now which do you think better? Change the presumption? Or commit all those acts?
"I'm a strong proponent of fair use, meaning I fight against any attempt to eliminate the user's right to make a backup copy or do time-shifting of broadcast content."
Um, only the second is allowed. Newyorkcountylawyer covered this in his first interview. I suggest you go read it instead of presuming.
And if your parents brought you up well, you would have been encouraged to share the good things you have with your friends.
"Yes. I could argue the wrongness of practically perpetual copyright and how accepting THAT is immoral, etc... but I don't have to."
A red herring shot down when faced with the fact that most piracy falls within Queen Anne terms, or unreleased material.
"Hundreds of millions of people have the capability of getting a copy, without taking one from someone else, without spending a cent, without investing any materials, without incurring any risk. With less effort than wiping their ass. Asking them to pay for this nebulous thing they can have without cost to themselves or anyone else is essentially appealing to their sense of charity."
Morality actually. IP is only nebulous to those who had no hand in it's creation. As for "cost". Well not everything is measured in dollars and cents.
"You can hate the fact that the earth revolves around the sun. You can refuse to accept it. But its still going to happen without fail and there's not a damned thing you can do about it."
An interesting ethical stance. Would you care to see it more widely employed than just music? The list of things that people would like to do is infinite, and the things one can "do about it" are ineffective. Care to make a wager on what kind of society one will end up with and would you like to live in it?
"You're better off accepting it and enjoy the ride and save your sanity. Which appears to be what Radiohead has done, since they are ACCEPTING people offering NOTHING and still letting them download it."
It's easier for a rich man to be charitable than a beggar.
just go back and enter 0 for the price. download and enjoy the music, next month if you are not billed you can go back and buy it for 5 pounds again.
I haven't bought it yet either, because like you I only know them form name. Shame on me, I know.
On the other hand, I'm quite knowledgable in banking transactions. If you paid this with a credit card, then you won't pay an exchange fee. Okay, the exchange rate will be slightly inflated, but you won't notice. If you did a wire transfer on the other hand, and it wasn't intra-european (you talk about dollars, so I don't expect it to be), then you will pay a fee.
Is the album any good? I don't need to know from Radiohead fans, but from someone like me that doesn't know them.
i tried to buy the album. three times over 2 days. their web site was insanely slow. then once i got on there i couldnt figure out how the buy the damn thing. it pissed me off so i said screw it and didnt bother to pirate it either.
if bands are going to do this they need to understand that their web site/store is an important part of the process if you want people to take it seriously and follow through on a purchase. and if they cant even get on the damn thing and/or cant figure it out once they do its a waste of time.
regarding the article, its obvious that certain people/companies have a vested interest in making sure that piracy is to blame if the sales arent up to expectations. and i would also suggest that a large number of people "pirated" it because they couldnt get on the site to buy the damn thing!
getting it off of BitTorrent would have just been easier. Either way these people weren't going to pay for it, so why wouldn't they just go for the easy route?
I haven't got a credit card. How the hell am I suppose to buy the Radio Head album? No wonder people still turn to P2P and usenets to download.
Guess it shows that todays youngsters have a prefered method of aquiring their media. Either you go through layers of flash-animated blah-blah on some obscure site to get the album or you go to thepiratebay, enter the album name and voila. Downloaded and ready to play...
Seems that the music industry is not just loosing money on the media but also loosing the whole delivery infrastructure investment.
Break the sound barrier - bring the noise.
Personally I want to listen to it first before I decide to purchase and for how much. What is strange about that? Not to mention getting on that website has been a real bear. None of the links were all that straight forward. This is what bittorent is for.
for a lossless download, and I would've bought the eventual CD release (non discbox), too.
... very obvious to the rescue!
I can't believe our friend phantomfive can write with a straight face that "Commentators offered up the opinion that this was probably more out of habit than malice". WTF? I mean, since when has piracy been around huh? And since when do pirates download files out of malice?
Does he seriously think that someone starts his computer in the morning, puts some bittorents to download with a big grin in his face while saying to himself "har har! Witness the evil I am going to do today!".
Piracy is because of conveniency and quality. Of course people are going to download a 256Kb VBR file or ape file intead of a lousy 128kbps file. Without having to find the proper website. Without having to write captachas and filling some forms, and giving their email adress, and fearing the website not to be genuine.
But having your friend copy his paid-for album onto your USB stick isn't fair use in any sense that I understand (legal or ethical).
It is allowed, and the levy charged on recordable media (mp3 players, CDR, etc) is given to the record companies to compensate for this friend-to-friend copying.
That's one, really, really crappy webpage. I don't blame people for downloading it from a "pirate" site. Much easier than trying to figure out how to get it from the inrainbows site.
I've never heard of these guys, but I hope their music is better than their web site.
My mate got it on torrent and then went back and paid them £10 on the site (without downloading). Suspect quite a few folk will be doing it that way round.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
If n downloads were paied for and gave them an average of 5pounds (so they get 5*n pounds) and there were 2*n downloads together, that means 2.5punds per download overall - thats about 10*n $ for 2*n downloads, but if they sold 2*n CDs via a major label, they'd have 2*n $ (because major labels give their artists an average of 1$ per sold CD)
DID YOU GET THIS? this means, that they have FIVE TIMES MORE MONEY than they'd have if all these downloads (including the unpaied downloads) were all legal CD sales!!!
if the unpaied downloads were illegal downloads or at least not-bought CDs (which i think is more reallistic) this means they'd only have n $, if they sold the CD via a major label... so in this (imo more reallistic) scenario they have TEN TIMES MORE MONEY than what they'd have, if they sold the album on CD via a major label
C'mon, math isn't THAT hard...
but as many people pointed out, they could even do better - they could use bittorrent for distribution (to keep server-costs down - which would mean, they'd get more profit out of the 10*n $) and give people a preview of the songs, as incentive to buy (I, for one, might buy it, if I could get a preview...)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Because they can.
Seriously, that's not meant to be an asshole answer or anything. But if they honestly expected to make more money off their album by giving it away on the Internet as an essentially free download...as opposed to a regular music store release, I'd have to question their logic in the first place.
If you give the opportunity to people to "name their price," and you give them the option of "absolutely nothing" among the selections, they're going to save their money for what they need and download what they want for free. Obviously there are many exceptions to this (I believe they did sell 1.2 million of their boxed sets by one figure?), but the Forbes article would seem to indicate that there were far few "Good Samaritans" on the Internet than they were expecting...which, to be cynical, would seem to suggest to me that they really don't understand the medium they're dealing with yet. At least they're trying, though.
Why not use Paypal?
Because paypal has particularly bad ways of handling chargebacks, and a site like this will probably generate a lot of them. That said, Google Checkout would seem to be a better way to do it.
For Radiohead, the profit in this is not just money. There is the massive amount of PR, as well (all the geek rags are talking about Radiohead!). And, there's the marketing list: everyone who downloads it from Radiohead's site (which is over a million people so far) have to sign up and provide postal and e-mail addresses. In other words, Radiohead now has DIRECT CONTACT INFORMATION to millions of fans. They get to manage this communication directly now. From a marketing perspective, that is priceless.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Ok here's the problem with Bit Torrent and other free downloads. There's no marketing involved. It's all word of mouth. That's bad for the marketing industry as they can't show you all their other products that they have for sale. You are downloading a song so you won't see that new Led Zeppelin compilation at 65$ that just came out with the DvD interviews and limited posters.
/sigh
So the record companies can't push boy bands as hard anymore because people know they are crap and just won't listen to them. So they are doing the next evolution in marketing. Pussycat Dolls and Rock Group Supernova, American Idol. Well that worked well except legitimate artists don't want to go that route.
The Record companies don't have a problem with iTunes because of the massive ads. As long as they can put something somewhere to entice you to buy this latest no-name band that they just singed to a ridiculous contract, and make a slim profit they'll be happy.
Let's see are there any ads on the iTunes web site?
http://www.apple.com/itunes/
Mya, my bra....
1) It's the same math it's always been - there is nothing magical about it being on the 'net.
2) If you are unknown, you aren't going to make money. Period.
Taking 2 first - if you're unknown, then you have to make yourself known before you can make a lot of money. It's easier with the web to make your music known to people who actively seek out music, rather than passively consume it via whatever radio/tv stations they have access to. You have to make the investment of time and effort to keep playing live, selling stuff mail order, sending cds to magazines/radio stations etc. This hasn't changed.
But the net makes it easier to have 1 central location where people can find what you've done, listen to it, and, if the Radiohead model is followed,
buy it immediately.
Personally I think Radiohead missed a trick here and could have just made it available for free and asked for donations - not just for this CD but for any previous or future release. They probably can't make all their CDs free because they probably belong to other companies now, but the band doesn't even need to say anything for it to be obvious that they'd rather honest fans who'd not paid for some of the stuff they've downloaded to donate to them direct for piracy of earlier releases.
A blind autistic rhesus monkey could see the music industry is a bad outdated business model.
This name your price won't help,duh!(lol,now if grocers,car dealers and gas stations would give it a try)
The music industry is dead!Long live music!Long live a level playing field for talented artists.
Long may we remember the industry that fed us crap,kept talent hidden and screwed everyone involved.
I'm sure there are bleeding hearts who say"what about the jobs of the innocent?"
No one in the industry is innocent,from the head of MCA to the pimply clerk at Sam Goodies.They all supported the cause.To quote the Judge Smales character from "Caddyshack":"The world needs ditchdiggers too".
Music survived before the industry,I wouldn't be surprised to find if flourishes magnificently after the industry rots.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Misinformation is rampant these days, and Forbes is one of the worst offenders.
I can not even remember the number of times that these sorts of studies turned out to be funded by some party with an agenda.
There are other factors involved here. I'm betting that some people couldn't get through to the radiohead site, some people also don't feel comfortable giving out their credit card online (or just on a site that looks like inrainbows.com), and I'm sure some people just heard about radiohead from this little stunt and wanted to check them out but not pony up the cash.
Me, personally, I'm waiting for the cd release. I know it's old fashioned, but I like owning cds of things that I pay for. Maybe if the download was in flac I would have given them the cash, but I just don't think mp3s are worth anything. It's not an audiophile response, because I'm sure I'll have a hard time spotting the difference between the download and the cd, its more that I prefer loseless because then I don't have to worry about quality loss when I transcode. So yes, I did torrent the album, but the when it comes out in January, I'll gladly pay my $12.00 for the cd.
Someone who pays 0, when the store accepts 0 as a price is NOT a pirate. They are a legitimate customer who paid what was asked. No piracy.
Even then what they fail to consider is how many of these $0 purchasers simply saw this as an opportunity to hear music from a new source.
"Hmm, I've never heard anything by Radiohead before. What? I don't have to pay? I think I'll go check them out."
That is what I did.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Those pansy-ass journalists with their sugary treehugging hippy theories can speak for themselves.
I downloaded it from the wrong place for free (rather than from the right place for free) beacuse that's the best way I know to feel that I'm hurting people, and that makes me feel all tingly and eeeevil inside.
I hardly think I'm the only one.
sudo ergo sum
Of course the album was pirated more than purchased, even at name-your-price! There are more people without a credit card than with, on the 'Net, especially in the age range that downloads the most.
(Not saying anything about what I think of the price Radiohead's music is worth. No, Nothing. Nope. Must... resist...)
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Well, it's a radiohead album so it will be whiny and depressing. But, as far as whiny and depressing goes, Radiohead are probably the whiniest and the most depressing, so I guess in a way that means it should be good?
I downloaded this on the day it came out. I hadn't heard any tracks at all from the album.
They asked me how much I wanted to pay for it. I said zero. I got my download.
I think they're doing this the wrong way: download for free, and make a payment if you want to once you've heard it, enjoyed it, and decided what it's worth to you.
I was genuinely surprised to pay before hearing, but perhaps that was a step too far...
Nevermind the nagware widget.
Just have a short blurb from the band.
Here's our new album. Copy it as you like. Freely give it to your friends. Come to our side and pay for it if you like it. Keep this notice intact.
They could use some old game pirate intros as a template even. '-)
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The main issue is that the site didn't work for the first 4 days.
I'm sure that had a lot to do with it.
I wanted to buy it, but couldn't. I downloaded it elsewhere, but I still went back and paid. But I can see how many would probably not go back.
Well... my guess is that any recent pirated copy >160kbps would have been re-encoded at a higher bit rate based on the 160kbps version Radiohead released.
There *might* be a higher quality rip of the album sometime before the actual cd goes to get pressed but I doubt it is has leaked yet.
Just to follow up... here is a portion from an interview with Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead on quality:
"We talked about it (160kbps audio quality) and we just wanted to make it a bit better than iTunes, which it is, so that's kind of good enough, really. It's never going to be CD quality, because that's what CD does."
So it seems they thought they were releasing something better than iTunes 128 aac versions, however; if I recall 128kpbs aac rips are closer to 192kbps mp3s. So chalk one up for them trying... but penalize them for not knowing their technology.
I've never paid for a Radiohead CD because I didn't get into them until the whole Napster thing went down.
However, now that I can pay them direct, I'll probably end up sending more simply for the past albums I have that I didn't pay for.
So I figure $70 ($10 per album) isn't bad.
I was genuinely surprised to pay before hearing,
Jesus Christ, why? Are you allowed to read a book before you buy it? Are you allowed to see a movie before paying for the ticket? Are you allowed to sample a meal in a restaurant before choosing to pay? Are you allowed to wander around in a pair of shoes before deciding to purchase them? No! Why the hell should an album be any different?
the cheap way to buy hits is to buy compilations, theese are priced similarlly to albums and have a collection of recent hits from various artists on them (they are often double CD sets with 20 odd tracks on each) but they don't come out until quite some time after the music is released and are only good for those who have a wide enough taste to find compilations that fit. CD singles are as you say overpriced basically if you want all the hit singles on an album it is cheaper to buy the album than to buy CD singles.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It's FITTER, happier, more productive, etc.
I've spend far too much time listening to that record to let it pass. . .
I tried to buy the album, but I was supposed to "create an account" just to give them money. The checkout process was more difficult then just downloading it somewhere. If they had setup just a simple paypal buy now button or something like that (no account needed), I bet they would've sold a heck of a lot more.
Narcissisticly blogged: http://robrohan.com/2007/10/11/dinosaurs-will-die/
It's been this way since I've been alive. When there were tapes there were always the friends who bought the tapes, and the friends who bought the blank tapes. There will always be freeloaders. It's pointless trying to convert them into paying customers.
I'm just wondering why/how the pirated version would be encoded at 192kbps, when the original files from which they would have been made are at 160kbps. Remember that the CD is not yet available in stores. This would just mean that someone would have to re-encode the 160kbps files at 192kbps, and end up losing something along the way.
"I know together we'll make the possible totally impossible" - Homme
It seems to me lately I am running across more and more people who only download from P2P. Even when they can help a musical group shove their latest album up the RIAA's ass and do more damage to that organization than just about anyone else up to this point. This behavior seems to me to be obsessive to the point of addiction.
This is why I have decided to start the Bit Torrent Crapulence Hotline. So get your unhelpful P2P infringing ass on the phone and call BTCH. The number is 1-800-P2P-HELP.
Disclaimer: This ad in no way discourages the downloading via P2P, of any music sponsored by the money grubbing jurassic era ass-ociation known as the RIAA.
Maybe if Radiohead had made sure the "e-commerce" part of the website worked on the "release day" a greater fraction of people would have bought it instead of snarfing it.
There were a number of "minor" problems, like the fact that the site was down, or unusably slow, the fact that they made you go digging to do currency conversion, etc... but a big problem was that the "update basket" button did not update the subtotal from 0.00 to whatever you had entered as your price - you just had to enter your price in the subtotal and take it on faith to press "pay now" (which was not intuitive).
Compare this to the ease of pulling it down using bittorrent.
For the record I paid 5 pounds (plus the 45 pence 'transaction charge' they tack on *after* you hit "pay now" which *isn't* listed in the subtotal/ update basket screen). Of the two other people I know who tried to buy it, one gave up and pulled it down off a torrent, and the other guy just gave up in frustration.
Your very simple math is overly simple.
Without the label advertising for them, it's possible they will sell fewer copies. Nonetheless, any advertising costs will be incurred by the band itself, which comes out of their bottom line.
Plus they paid for the recording themselves, where normally the label will pay for the studio time.
They may gross more, but there's a lot more cost involved when you DIY.
In this case, they probably got away without advertising - the buzz generated by the news stories did that job for them (though the PR work of getting that message out probably wasn't free). That's why it was so clever that they announced the "Pay what you want" model so close to the release date. But that's not sustainable - for each ensuing release, it won't really be a news story anymore - and they'll probably need to incur an increasing amount of PR and advertising costs to get the word out.
It was some small no-name band selling their music and "making it work". Of course a band like Radiohead - one of the last bands on the planet to get true artist development from a major label - can make digital sales to their large fanbase. It doesn't change that fact, however, that this sort of practice de-values music and makes the hill that much steeper for aspiring artists. I run a small indie label and it makes me sick for my artists every time I hear the slowly prevailing notion that music "is only for promotion - merch and performances are for profit". It is this mindset that leads people to believe that illegal downloading is OK seeing as it is just "more promotion" which will in turn help them when they tour... never mind the fact that serious touring is out of the question for many artists due to... you guessed it.. the fact that no one is paying for their music.
When it clearly hasn't.
So what if it has been "pirated more than bought"... at this point every album in the world is probably "pirated more than bought".
The difference is, those bands do not make near the money off of an album sale like radiohead (and a few others). Doing it in this model has FAR less overhead (bandwidth, site creation, music creation (which, I might add in a sub-parentheses, is CHEAPER than ever before) in cost, and the profit is ALL yours!
Radiohead has already made far more money than they would have with 5x (and possibly more) as many album sales with a record company, and people are trying to give the impression that it failed? I don't even listen to Radiohead and I think that is retarded.
In addition to all of that, we are talking about them right now! Free publicity, and if you remotely like what they are doing, you can go download their music for FREE right now! THEN, IF you like it, you can give them some money for it! They are leaving the option open to you... and you don't like it?! What... do you just like to complain?!
when I went to the site to legitimately purchase the album, all the pages kept timing out, I couldn't even get to the point where you enter the price (I was actually going to throw $7 at them despite knowing the sub par 160kbit quality) but even hours later the checkout still wouldn't work. So I jumped onto my local bittorrent and downloaded the album.
The thing is, I already have the album so why am I going to give their site a 3rd chance?
What they should have done is when you paid (or didn't pay) for the album, they would give you a choice to download the zip file or just a torrent. I have a feeling a lot of people would have downloaded the torrent and kept Radiohead's bandwidth usage to a minimum. Plus, with the amount of downloaders in the first few days, you would get the album in seconds instead of the 15 minutes it took me to download it from their poor, overworked server!
If they sell their album in CD form, they would get from ~$2.00 to 40 cents (depending on how shafted they are by their record company). Even after costs spent on bandwidth, if the average person downloading their music pays them $2.05 they would make more money than they would working with a label. Furthermore, if they get a bunch of cheapskates downloading their album for nothing, these people probably wouldn't have bought their music in the store anyway. And if they get a bunch of people paying $1.00 that wouldn't buy the album in the stores, that's a sale they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
Yes, their revenue will be much lower, but since they don't have to split any of it with a label, their profit will probably be much higher. This is the real fear of the labels: not that people stop buying music, but that their 'services' as a middleman will no longer be worth the 300-1000% markup they put on everything.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
For a marketing program -- this was a success.
The real question is; What percentage of the people who paid nothing, would have bought this album if they had no free option? If the answer is MOST -- then you've lost nothing. RadioHead will probably get more people to their concerts - it appears most bands make nothing on their music sales anyway.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Is the album any good? I don't need to know from Radiohead fans, but from someone like me that doesn't know them.
Well, all of the songs are quite different from each other. There is no general theme to the collection. So, one was terrible (very electric) and I'll probably delete it, most were good (acoustic instruments with vocals and the singer has a strange voice but you get used to it), and one I found was very good (multilayered electrics with harmonized vocals). Your results may vary but I bet there's at least 1 track for everyone. All in all, the $5 I paid was a good deal - I would have put 8 if I'd heard it ahead of time.
When I said exchange fee, I understood it would be padded into the exchange rate.
It was probably more due to a problem with Radiohead's website design, and overloaded webservers not responding. I tried several times purchase their album from their website, but the website was so convoluted and clearly was unable to handle the load it was receiving. I got so far as registering, submitting my credit card information (which I was a bit hesitant to do, given the shoddy look of their website). I even got a confirmation number, followed by a bunch of garbled errors from the server database. However, I never was charged the price I offered (which was admittedly low, but that reflected my overall confidence in the system than my interest in the music). If most people trying to buy the album had the same experience I did, I can see why more people would just give up and download it elsewhere. Hopefully Radiohead, and other high-profile artists learn from this, and invest a little more in their IT beforehand.
a collective of artists/labels create there own bit torrent site call it, Sandhead, you pay whatever amount for the year with the minimum being like twenty bucks, there are "hip" flash made graphs indicating your proportion to investment and the involved artists are the "scene" group, uploading all manner of in radiohead's case, bootlegs, photos, video clips. But also, David Lynch might be part of this collective known as Sandhead. You guys won't get this, cause your dumb, no just kidding, you're just linear.
If you *like* the band, it really wouldn`t matter from *where* you got the album, would it? What`s the problem in later getting into their website and paying $1, or $10 if the case? Bands could even track bittorrents for a change, and minimize bandwidth costs. just my $1...
From a social standpoint, there's no way to compare. Consider my actions:
I didn't have my credit card with me, so I originally "bought" it for $0, I think downloaded it, after having to wait a while. So that I could more easilly access the album from a place where I had a CD recorder, I uploaded it to my webspace. A few days later, I went back and paid $20, and then didn't download the album (since I already had it).
The fact is, because it's "free" people feel just fine about throwing around willy-nilly. But they still may be donating money for it, but their transactions may not be exactly the norm for an album release, precisely for that reason.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
The album wasn't available for free, if you entered zero, you were presented with a 'handling free' of 45 pence (about 1 USD). Just Saying.
btw, i haven't downloaded it either way, i heard it was a bit tame from a lot of people.
I clicked through a dozen or so screens trying to pay, when I got to the "Enter your user id/password" and "Not a registered member? - register here..." screen I gave up. Too much hassle, too much personal info requested, no idea what I was buying (how about a sample track, guys?), no incentive for me to jump through any more hoops.
This band on the other hand, let me have the album and said "If you like this, send some money to our paypal account...".
I listened to the album a few times, liked it, they got $10 out of me.
No sig today...
Yes, I'm allowed to stand in the book store and read a couple of pages, I'm allowed to try the shoes for size, I'm shown movie trailers....etc. Even in the restaurant I'm legally allowed to not pay the marked prices if it's rubbish.
No sig today...
Thanks for the info
When I said exchange fee, I understood it would be padded into the exchange rate.Personally, I can only say that the padding wasn't ever outrageous. Could have been lucky, and if importing stuff from the US wasn't extremely hard, I'd be taking advantage of the current exchange rate....
Google Checkout? Not sure I'd want to provide my full name, address etc to an organisation that already has my full search records. Plus Google Analytics tracking of other sites I've visited. At the moment, I'm just a number to Google, and I'd like to keep it that way.
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
Yes, I'm allowed to stand in the book store and read a couple of pages, I'm allowed to try the shoes for size, I'm shown movie trailers.
How, exactly, is that equivalent to downloading an album and then paying for it only after you've listened through it? Or do you make a habit of reading entire books and watching whole movies before paying the purchase price?
Even in the restaurant I'm legally allowed to not pay the marked prices if it's rubbish.
Umm, no, you're not. If a restaurant wanted to press it, they could charge you with theft. Most probably wouldn't, but the fact is, it's very much illegal.
How can they characterize it as "stealing" when you download it from an offsite source - for $0.00 - instead of downloading it from their site for $0.00? Is this like colored bits or something? For it to be theft, you'd have to be depriving them of something. It's somehow okay to pay nothing for it as long as you get it from their site? How is that any better? Seriously, what.
And that's why the site worked for me in Firefox. I enabled javascript for it.