Just 38 percent of Radiohead fans paid for the latest album, according to data recently supplied by comScore. The band began allowed fans to name their price for the downloadable release, In Rainbows, a closely-watched experiment. But most fans grabbed the album for nothing, and a significant percentage paid next to nothing. According to the data, 17 percent paid an average of $4 for the album, while 12 percent paid between $8 and $12. >> DMN
I had many meetings last weeks and almost everybody I spoke to asked me what I thought of this. My world is all about imagination and I pictured a world where every artist did this, the excitement would last very short. It's a fantastic experiment, but not a very sustainable one IMHO. What would happen if you put a basket with $100 bills in a crowded park and wrote a note to saying 'only for the poor'? Do you think only the poor would take money out? My point here is simple. If you record a piece of music, you need to package it, price it and distribute it. Free can be part of the mix, but you want people to pay a fair amount for the product. I would like to see the experiment where Radiohead launches a new album and sells it online for 5 euro, paying 15 euro extra gives you the entire Radiohead repetoire, including never before released songs, the lyrics, and a bunch of pictures and video's. Of course everything DRM free and in good quality.
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