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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.'"
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.
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
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
Quote from article:
Ask Jonathan Coulton if the model works.
Or maybe the guys at Magnatune.
They still seem pretty sold on it.
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! --
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
Not true, or at least, not always true.
Historically, some genres have never sold enough CDs to really make much money that way, and those bands have made their money by touring. Other genres reverse this trend -- successful pop music, in particular, rakes in the bucks through CD sales and generally breaks even or even loses money on tour. Metal has always tended to make money on touring.
There's also a size component to this; the bigger the act the more likely they are to view touring as a promotional expense to boost CD sales, where the real money is made. The huge acts often turn their live shows into expensive extravaganzas of lighting, pyrotechnics, sets and costumes that make touring a net negative. The guy that managed U2 for Island records told me that their 1997 "PopMart" tour lost about 50,000 UK pounds per show, but that it was well worth it because of the effect on CD sales. Smaller acts are more careful about what they spend on their shows, and they work harder to push merchandise sales at shows (especially t-shirts, which for metal bands have historically been a major source of income).
It all comes down to questions of CD sales volume, concert attendance and the details of contract negotiations which determine how much of the take from the various enterprises goes to the band. You can't really make any kind of strong statements about how musicians make their money, because it varies too much.
That said, my expectation is that in the future even acts that currently make most of their money from CD sales will have to shift to a performance-driven approach.
My information, BTW, comes from a six-month stint designing a royalty-calculation engine for Universal Music. While there I spent lots of time talking with guys who negotiated and managed band contracts and payments from the label side.
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I don't know why, since that actually sounds like a pretty fun gig, but that sentence totally cracked me up.
:-)
It was a little bit fun and a lot disturbing. What makes artist royalty calculation hard is all of the weird little one-off clauses in contracts -- all of them designed to screw the artist out of their money. Musicians who make money do it in spite of everything the labels can do. From my point of view, though, their sliminess actually simplified my job. Whenever we'd come across some really impossible-to-implement contract term, UMG would just say "Oh, ignore that -- just simplify it in our favor and we'll settle on audit". What that meant was that they just wouldn't pay the artist part of their royalties, and then if the artist bothered paying $100K to a team of auditors to analyze the books and discover the missing money, the label would draw up a settlement and offer to pay a fraction of what they owed. Since the artists' other option was a lengthy and even more expensive court battle, they'd take the settlement and the label would continue ignoring that clause. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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