Radiohead’s donationware album release
Geoff Manne kicked off an interesting discussion about Radiohead’s experiment in variable (and voluntary) pricing for its new album OK Computer. The “give stuff away for free to sell the same and other stuff later” has certainly worked for other artists such as Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Peter Watts, and Ronald Jenkees to name a few, for whom, as Tim O’Reilly put it, “obscurity is a far greater threat … than piracy.” It seems that novelists have a bit of an edge in this game, because online texts, even nicely formatted ones, are incomplete substitutes for books. That can’t be said for Radioheads full-quality mp3s, which makes their experiment all the more interesting.
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October 2nd, 2007 at 7:05 pm
More power to Radiohead! By the way, I’ve cofounded a site called SongSlide that lets any independent band sign up for free and let their fans pick the price for their music. Sorry to self-promote here, but it’s too dead-on to pass up. If you’re interested, you can check it out at www.songslide.com.
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:29 pm
The more I think about it, the more I think it probably won’t backfire for Radiohead, but that it also isn’t easily transported to other bands. There are a couple of additional facts:
1) you can’t order the music without paying something–even if you shooce to pay 0, you’re still hit with a service charge of 45p.
2) they are releasing the album through normal channels (i.e., in hard copy) next year. as many have pointed out, this is sort of like a sanctioned leak.
3) they are selling a souped up boxed set thingy which completists and rabid fans will buy, and it’s about $90, if I recall correctly.
Even at a pretty low rate of payment, and even for pretty low payments, depending on how much of the financing/recording/promoting/distributing/etc. of a record a label would have done, and depending on the label’s cut, the band could still come out ahead here. But this isn’t going to happen for virtually all other bands.
I’m most convinced by the price discrimination arguments. Of course it is the case that for people who would pay $2 for the album, but were otherwise confronted with a choice of paying $10.00 or stealing it, this will yield revenue to the band they wouldn’t otherwise have recieved. Or at least it would if the band actually charged $2. I guess some noble souls will go ahead and contribute anyway (and some will even still pay the $10.00 they would have paid anyway). But once the novelty wears off, that isn’t sustainable. The $10 reservation price folks will all pay less, and its anyone’s guess, even if the $2 folks all paid full value, whether the net result is positive. And of course the sizable number of folks out there who think information wants to be free won’t pay anything anyway.
It is all very interesting, and I do hope they give us the data.