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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).
Now there is proof that artist do not need the record labels to make money, I hope someone in RIAA sees this and trembles as they show it to their higher ups!
To see a few of my Android apps goto: www.hartwired.com
They probably made more money off their album doing it this way than they ever would have made off the same album going through a record company. By the time you account for all the middlemen, marketing, and so forth, they might even have lost money on the album based on the level of sales, downloads, and so on.
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.
Sincerely yours,
The RIAA
Not bad earnings, considering that this means (a) the album went platinum with no marketing help from a major label, and (b) even letting consumers name their own price (and pirate the album freely), Radiohead is making better royalties than they would through a label.
Destroys both of the arguments the labels make in their own defense. Other artists would be fools not to learn from Radiohead.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Piracy is unauthorized replication and distribution. A copyright holder can require that those who get something for free get it from a specific source. In this case, downloading it for free from Radiohead is not piracy, while downloading it via eDonkey is piracy.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
There's one thing that the record companies provide that you can't typically get on your own, and that's publicity.
Radiohead is only able to cause this much of a stir and make this much money because everyone and his brother heard "Creep" on the radio umpteen times in the late 90's. Otherwise nobody would know who the hell Radiohead is and their name-your-price album would sell no better than the thousands of other bands charging $5 for a CD that hardly anybody has ever heard of.
And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think I'd like nothing more than the complete breakdown of the music industry so that you'd actually have to go out to bars to hear people play. I think with national exposure given to a select few by the media companies, great local and regional bands have a much tougher time finding an audience.
If it no longer paid to spend the millions promoting those few bands, they'd have to compete with the people who didn't win the record contract lottery, and we'd all be better off.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
This is all well and good, but it completely ignores the fact that if people are pirating music, the artists can't make any money!
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
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.
I like the concept and I am glad Raidiohead tried this.
After looking at the royalty rates for software authors, musical artists, and other creative arts (movie,video,etc)...
The big companies / middle men are raking it in.
And the consumer is paying the bill.
The internet is leveling the playing field.
Lower cost of product, fewer hurdles to distribution, censorship by the consumer's choices (purchase y/n), variable/negoiatable pricing.
More money in being an artist.
Lower cost to consumer.
More artists can make a living being creative. (but possibly fewer mega-rich ones)
Fewer creative limits for the artist.
And the parasitic middle men can change careers.
Middle men that actually add value to the process will still exist. (but make a much more modest income)
The artist win ! The consumers win !
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
what a Creep
I really hope all the other musicians still under the shackles of a RIAA-affiliated label will feel positively JEALOUS of the kind of dough Radiohead is making!
While I despise greed, it might just be a very powerful force in the downfall of the labels and therefore the RIAA. Just imagine all those musicians just NOT renewing their contracts (or even trying to end their current ones) and go onto forming their own label and sell their music directly to their fans!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Possibly true, But also think about all the people who have heard of Radiohead BECAUSE of the media hoopla surrounding the fact they have decided to sell the album direct to the public via the website and cut out the RIAA/Record Companies.
There is also the added purchase support from those who may not be big Radiohead fans who would normally buy a record from them, but who are purchasing the album in order to support their decision to embrace the web... and not something to outlaw like certain parties would appearently like to see happen.....
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.
Hang on a sec, that abbreviated would make a cool ID. I really should do that...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
How long have you been waiting for that?
C-x C-s C-x k
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.
Yes. That would be RIAA trying to buy out all the copies.
Segmentation fault. Ore dumped.
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.
Extensively processed music will become a thing of the past. People will play and record on devices that are much cheaper than they do currently. The lower capital costs will enable them to better weather rampant piracy, surviving on fans' CD purchases, some legitimate online sales, and concert revenues.
How does that make sense?
You can't take the sky from me...
http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/index3.htm
And if you don't have the knowhow or money to do the recording yourself, there are all kinds of small studios with perfectly decent engineers that charge less than $1,000 for a day. It's perfectly feasible to record an album for $5,000-$10,000 this way, or much less if you have connections or friends in the small-time recording industry.
After that, electronic distribution is essentially free, via MySpace, or by setting yourself up on iTunes, eMusic, etc. If you also need CDs, a company like Kunaki can produce them for you on the fly for less than $2 each, *and* handle the ordering back end.
Compared to a lot of other things you could do for a living, music is *not* an expensive industry to be a part of, if you don't buy into the rock 'n' roll life style, often lived by artists who are *fearsomely* in hock to their major label for some ungodly advance money that it will take royalties years to pay off, if ever.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Hey, when life throws you a soft pitch like that you don't just tap it for a single, you smack it out of the park.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
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..