Slashdot Mirror
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).
The website failed and left me frustrated. I went to my bit torrent site of choice and got it there.
Then I decided it was alright but not really worth paying for.
I wonder what Radiohead thinks about all the people who tried to pay for their music, couldn't and downloaded it / got stoned instead.
and maybe it's due to the novelty of it.
would artists make the same sort of profits (eclipsing POS sales) if this model was more common place?
dunno
but it's a bit shortsighted to take one positive example and treat it as a working model
Question: How much money did it take to get the band's publicity to the level they enjoy now? At the risk of being the devil's advocate, is it entirely likely that they are using the publicity someone else (the labels) paid for to generate sales for this album? Perhaps we should subtract such an equivalent cost from the figures and see how much they ACTUALLY made.
I've never been one for going out to hear local musicians -- but in the past year I have been to several local concerts in bars and small theatres, and almost without exception I have immediately purchased one or more CDs (indie, of course -- often they're just burned CD-ROMs) from the artist. I have been frankly amazed at how good some of the these unknown local artists are. So the whole "having to go out to bars" thing has certainly worked for me.
Radiohead has always been planning on releasing their CD in January. Putting out a 160 kbps crap quality version is there way to whet your appetite for the real CD, which will probably contain more content than the mp3 release and be of much better quality.
They'll have a professional organization, but no lobbyists and no power. They'll be more or less fungible--Home Managers, parallel to Road Managers. Some will even do both.
you mean like cdbaby or more like Jamendo or DMusic and of course GarageBand?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The facts are:
1. Radiohead has been in business for, say, 21 years.
2. Radiohead signed a SIX album recording contract with EMI, that promoted the hell out of them for two decades.
3. Labels were indirectly, but substantially, responsible for changing their name from "On a Friday" to "Radiohead".
4. They recently admitted that working without a label is "both liberating and terrifying"...
Yeah, that will teach those labels! Bands that have been busting their ass for 20+ years don't need them any longer! Somehow, I don't think if I put up my album under the same conditions, that I would make daily front page at Slashdot and spend an afternoon thumbing my nose at the labels.
These guys have paid their dues, toured until exhaustion, and have worked within the system for longer than a lot of people responding here have been alive. People, please, get off of BitTorrent and just pay a nickle, or a quarter or a dollar for every song you really like on their site. At least give the rest of us without the Radiohead exposure the hope that if we earn even a fraction of their commission, we'll be ok...
My sister does this actually, she has recorded her last 4 albums in small studios, and then sells her music through itunes and at live gigs, she isn't rich but she actually makes a decent living. After factoring in the cost of printing the cd's and recording plus putting money asside for her next recording she ends up with about $16AU pure profit left over from the cd sales. Which isn't bad at all seeming she does about 2 - 3 gigs a week and will ussually sell about 20 - 40 cd's at each gig ontop of the door fee. I am envious of her actually even though she earns much less than me she gets to spend her weeks chilling out with diffrent people writing music and playing in there gigs for fun etc.