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Radiohead May Have Made $6-$10 Million on Name-Your Cost Album
mytrip passed us a link to a Wired article indcating that if music industry estimates are correct Radiohead has made as much as $10 million on the 'In Rainbows' album so far. This despite the estimates of widespread piracy of the album as well. "[The estimate assumes] that approximately 1.2 million people downloaded the album from the site, and that the average price paid per album was $8 (we heard that number too, but also heard that a later, more accurate average was $5, which would result in $6 million in revenue instead).
I doubt many record labels would have permitted them to do this.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Making $6-$10 million on a new album the week it comes out is _unheard-of_ in the music biz-- especially since radiohead gets to keep most of it, if not virtually all of it. (When you buy a CD in the store for $14 less than a dollar actually goes to the artist). Also-- this album went platinum in the first week! Huge success for Radiohead.
Use this:
Number of album sales * Average Retail price * 0.1 = artist's take.
Labels, retailers middlemen and RIAA lawers generally take a 90% cut. Traditionally, the label pays for production and advertising, which was considerable pre-internet. Those costs have plunged now that the internet can hype anything and production costs can be trimmed to 2 or 3 good mics, some software and a laptop.
But all you really need to know is that the old way got them ~$2 an album, and this way got them $5 or more (estimated), while building considerable goodwill with fans. Sounds like a pretty good model to me.
If the musicians do not sign, the contracts will be changed.
If all new group boycotted the contracts en mass, they would change, literally over night.
I am not sure why you imply radiohead is being greedy.
They let the fans pick the price. The amount of money someone makes has NOTHING to do with greed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
- Pablo Honey
- The Bends
- OK Computer
- Kid A
- Amnesiac
- Hail to the Thief
The band have no record contract, having fulfilled it in 2004.The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. -- Albert Einstein
I paid $10 but dowloaded it twice. Once at home and once at work. Seemed to be easier than downloading it and then putting it on a thumb drive taking it to work and uploading it. I must be really stupid.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
The 45 pence charge was actually a credit card admin charge. If you put 0 in the box you didn't have to pay anything at all.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
Except there was no transaction fee if you entered a zero price.
Actually, no. There was a credit card processing fee of .45 pounds. So strangely enough, if you opted to pay nothing, there was no need for a processing fee and thusly no charge. That way you could check out the music for free, and if you decided it was worth it you could then pay whatever you liked.
How does that make sense?
You can't take the sky from me...
http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/index3.htm
It's a marketing campaign made by the cheap recording gear makers. It is NOT TRUE.
Extensive processing can be done by anyone with the computer.
However, before extensive processing comes, we need a very basic thing - a good room, a good instrument, a good microphone. It's very very expensive to make a good room, buy good equipment and microphones - plus, using them requires training and experience.
Without a good basic sound to start from, all the processing done on the computer will not sound good.
The cost of a quality musical instrument, as a tangible thing, might not be going down. But we're not talking about Strats or Steinways; we're talking about recording, specifically the processing end of it.
To that end, let's take amplifiers, which are the near-universal processing and monitoring side of the electric guitar. These are definitely getting cheaper. A Marshall stack is always going to be expensive, for a variety of reasons, but other amplifiers from companies like Line 6 and Roland keep bringing down the cost of quality amplification and effects. (Line 6's processor modules are also available as software plugins with no hardware dependancy, which can reduce or eliminate the need to have separate amplifiers/cabinets for each guitarist, as far as the recording process goes.)
Synthesizers are cheap, and getting cheaper. They consist largely or entirely of software, lately, and there's even a few free open-source packages that don't suck.
Commercial multi-track software recorders like Adobe Audition (formally the much more reasonably-priced Cool Edit Pro), and of course open-source products like Audacity and Ardour, allow more possibilities for recording, post-processing, editing, and mixing than were ever dreamed possible with analog gear. Multiple-input sound cards from companies like RME and M-Audio keep dropping in price and gaining new features.
It is quite possible, and has been for some years, to produce extremely professional recordings with nothing more than a few good microphones, a decent outboard A/D device, a few selections of totally free software, good engineering practices (!), a spare bedroom, a revealing home stereo (or maybe just some quality headphones) for monitoring, and the instruments that the musicians already own. Oh, and a little bit of talent from everyone involved doesn't hurt, either...
So, in reply to you, UncleTogie: Good instruments have always been expensive, and will probably only become more so as the cost of raw materials continues to escalate. But gone are the days when the only way to cut an album was to rent time in a recording studio stuffed with gear, and so the cost of cutting an album is indeed dramatically lower than it has been in the past.
And in reply to GP: Because computers are, by any estimate, quite cheap and getting cheaper by the second, it is simply not very hard to produce "heavily-processed" music without a "proper" studio. These days, they're even fairly quiet, which again lessens the cost of recording -- there's just no great need to physically isolate a modern, quiet, cheap Dell machine from the recording space. This makes the whole process a lot cheaper in terms of real estate, dedication, and cabling. Even my 2-year-old laptop is able to run for extended periods with the fan completely disabled, its Hitachi hard drive is practically silent, and it is more than fast enough to enable nearly any manner of "professional" recording thanks to the virtues of USB 2.0 and Firewire.
Nine Inch Nails' most recent album was largely recorded in hotel rooms and tour buses, for example, using the same software and technology that is available to anyone else. And while the expensive Protools rig that Reznor finished the album with is sure to enable a smoother and more productive workflow than anything being produced in Audacity, that doesn't mean that a competent engineer cannot accomplish similar results with far less.
Back on topic, these lower barriers to entry all conspire to mean that a recording contract continues to be less and less useful to a musician or band which seeks to make money selling the products of their creativity, but that by no means is any indicator that quality must suffer in exchange.
Kid-proof tablet..
Remember that Southpark episode when Cartman gets that kid (Scott Tenorman) to eat his parents? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Tenorman_Must_Die
Radiohead was the band that told the kid that just ate the chili made out of his parents that he was a crybaby and totally not cool.
There.. now you know.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Except for if they sold it through the RIAA, they'd make 37 cents per sale, instead of $5. Or $1. Or whatever. Almost noone is so cheap that they can't beat what the RIAA pays.
Please stop stalking me, bro.