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.'"

Comments

website was melted down

[rkanodia]

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.

Tried to 'buy', did not work... still waiting...

[knarf]

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.

500k1200k?

[carbon16]

The /. headline is bogus. From TFA:

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.

and

That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com.

I can understand the "rushing-to-post-firsters" not R'ing TFA, but the editors? Come on guys, help us help you.

Factually incorrect headline

[cascino]

Headline: "Name-Your-Cost Radiohead Album Pirated More Than Purchased."

Quote from article:

On the first day that Radiohead's latest became available, around 240,000 users downloaded the album from copyright-infringing peer-to-peer BitTorrent sources, according to Big Champagne, a Los-Angeles-based company that tracks illegal downloading on the Internet. 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.

That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com. But Eric Garland, Big Champagne's chief executive, says illegal file-sharing is likely to overtake legal downloads in the coming weeks...

huh? fair use vs. stealing

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyways, I didn't pirate it because my friend put it on my USB stick for me (fair use).

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).

Re:Or maybe

[swillden]

a six-month stint designing a royalty-calculation engine for Universal Music.

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.