Interesting that people seemed to assume that £2.90 per album was some kind of failure for Radiohead's In Rainbows. Thing is, it's not how much people are paying that is the issue, but how much the band gets. £2.90 is considerably more that they'd get per sale via traditional methods, and it seems that it's a lot more than they'd get via iTunes, too - so it looks like a success to me.
Whether this will work for anyone other than the best band in the world remains to be seen, of course. ;-)
Posted to Music by Simon Brunning at November 08, 2007 02:01 PMPeople are drawing so many bad conclusions from this. See here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/06/radiohead_comcast_stats/
If anyone is going to buy the CD or box set, they'll have paid nothing. A lot of people who bought the album for $1, say, may not have bought the album at a higher price. A lot of people who downloaded it for free would normally have got a torrent for free anyway. A lot of the people who paid a token amount might normally have torrented it.
We can make few, if any, conclusions about the broader viability of direct sales of digital music from this exercise.
Posted by: Matt Savage on November 9, 2007 05:55 PM