The whole “self-release new album on the internet for whatever price the customer chooses experiment-thingy” appears to have actually worked. (As if you expected Radiohead to fail at something...) At this point, it seems like everybody and their mothers know what happened with the most recent Radiohead album, but in case you’ve been in a coma, it goes like this:
A year ago, Radiohead rolled up their sleeves, slicked back their hair, looked The Man in the face and spit hard. By deciding to self-release their album In Rainbows (TMT Review), they demonstrated just how out-of-touch the traditional distribution model was. It was a great success, of course. Everything was wonderful, the music world was changed forever, yadda yadda yadda.
The caveat? The results of the experiment were never released... until now, that is!
According to musically.com, Warner Chappell (Radiohead's publishing company) is set to make an official announcement soon that will "reveal details of their view of the Radiohead licensing experiment at the ‘You Are in Control’ conference in Iceland." In the meantime, the website has published some stats already, claiming that “three million album purchases including the box sets, CDs, and all downloads including iTunes and pay-what-you-like downloads.” This includes 100,000 purchases of the $80 box set version of the album, which is a lot of copies to even the most cynical of us. In fact, according to the site, "Radiohead had made more money before In Rainbows was physically released than they made in total on Hail To the Thief."
On the less positive side, it seems that quite a few people still torrented the album even though it was available for "free." But did Radiohead even care about the sales? Apparently so:
Dyball points to the fact that the band and their management never announced a timeline for the pay-what-you-like experiment and were watching the average price daily with a view to potentially withdrawing it any moment should it drop too low. Dyball points out that the average price went down after the download moved from uberfans to less committed fans, as expected.
Here are some other stats, straight from the source:
- After being made available for free for 3 months the album was no.1 in the UK and in the US
- 1st Radiohead album on iTunes – no.1 album selling 30,000 units in the US in the first week
- The physical CD has sold 1.75 million to date and is still top 200 UK & US
- They sold 100k boxsets via W.A.S.T.E.
- Nearing 17 million plays on last.fm
- 1.2 million fans will see the tour
- The digital income from the experiment made a material difference to WCM’s UK digital revenue this year
The band still isn’t telling how much it made per download, so we really don’t know how rich Radiohead are. Still, I think they’ve probably made enough at this point for Thom to finally just buy himself some sanity.
