Was the Radiohead experiment a success?
With just under a week of sales under their belt, was the band Radiohead right to see their new album, In Rainbows, directly to consumers?
According to Silicon Alley Insider, it appears that Radiohead has had 1.3 million copies of their new album downloaded so far. How much have consumers paid for an album they technically could have taken for free?
According to a poll on Read/WriteWeb, the average consumer has paid between $5 – $9 for the all MP3 album, and the second highest response falls n the $10 – $14 range. While the price is lower than you pay in the store for a CD, an artist of Radiohead’s stature typically makes $2.50 per copy sold. Even with the overhead for their site, the band comes out ahead of what they would with the record company.
The band is scheduled to release a physical copy of the CD at some point, but with the majority of their fans having already bought the download, sales will certainly be sluggish. There is no word on how many copies they have sold of the $80 box set the site was offering,but from the talk around various blogs, it sounds like it may have been a healthy number.
While this is not expected to bring the record industry to its knees, with the number of big name artists leaving their companies for more direct sales methods, it certainly won’t help things.
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