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).
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.
It's proof that well known band can make money without a record label. Which wasn't exactly news.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
what a Creep
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.....
A new band wouldn't turn this profit, but that doesn't mean the model can't scale down. I played in several bands for years, got put on a couple of ska complilations and our total record industry provided cut was under $500 bucks. Never got signed to a full album contract. If we'd skipped all that, put our music on a website and pushed a fan base to chip in, I suspect we'd have done more. Could we get 100 people to chip in $5 for a free download? I think so - we played show to that many people twice a month for years.
In the process, we would have gotten our music in front of more people and generated goodwill in the fan base. So there's a better growth potential, as buyers become, in a way, backers.
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
Yes. That would be RIAA trying to buy out all the copies.
Segmentation fault. Ore dumped.
How does that make sense?
You can't take the sky from me...
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
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..