Is it really a big surprise that so few people have been willing to pay for Radiohead's new album after they were invited to download it from their website and pay only as much as they felt appropriate.
When this was announced the Thom Yorke said something trite about trusting to the honesty of the public and proving the cynical record industry wrong.
Well that is a fine and noble idea but the fact that 62% of people have not paid anything and the rest have paid an average of 38Kronor says something else. The whole reason that people pirate music and films is because it is free and people like getting things for free or at least as cheap as possible. You only have to look at the scandal in the Swedish Moderata Party over ministers buying services without paying taxes to see this.
Still, maybe the people who downloaded the album for free from their website would have downloaded it for free from Pirate Bay or some other site anyway. In this case the band will not have lost out financially and have gotten a whole load fo free publicity.
A sign of life
6 months ago
2 comments:
Don't forget that 38% coughed up an average of 38 SEK. I don't know how many downloaded it in total, but I guess quite a few did so it probably turned a nice profit anyway. Especially since the band cut out the middle men. Their profit per sold album was probably higher than if it would have been if it would have been sold the traditional way.
Indeed, a normal record-deal would land them at 5kr per CD or below, depending on prepayed royaltise to cover the costs for putting the CD together...
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