When Radiohead offered their new album In Rainbows, for free through their website last year, many industry analysts and bigwigs watched the results very closely to see if the model was workable. The album has since been released on physical formats but the download experiment gained Radiohead a lot of new fans and masses of press.
However, despite the good intentions of the band, it seems that the majority of Radiohead fans decided free just wasn’t cheap enough for them and so downloaded it from illegal sources such as torrent tracking and peer-to-peer sites instead.
The findings come from a joint research paper published by P2P monitor Big Champagne and the UK’s MCPS-PRS royalty collector. According to NME, the report suggests that 2.3 million people eschewed the officially sanctioned download portal inrainbows.com to instead download it by other non-sanctioned means.
“[The number] far exceeds what outsiders have reported as the estimated download total from the band’s official website, regardless of whether those downloaders paid or not.”
This seems utter madness, as when something is offered for free through legitimate means, you’d expect music lovers to grateful and gracious in receiving the good given away. Instead, most of them have given Radiohead the finger and got the album in the same way they would have if the free offer had never been made.
Radiohead have never disclosed how many people downloaded from the site, or how much money they made from the venture. But they have said that it was a one-off and wouldn’t be repeated, so I assume it wasn’t all that successful.
If all those 2.3 million people had downloaded from the official site then maybe Radiohead would be repeating the scheme with their next album. And maybe those industry watchers would have urged other artists to do the same. As it is, piracy still seems to be king, and the current business model of the music industry is going to carry on faltering until it dies a painful death.
[Photo Source: Amazon.co.uk]
Um, and they didn’t expect this to happen?
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I think it’s a little much to, “expect music lovers to grateful and gracious…” If it’s free then it’s free no matter where I get it from. And as someone who struggled with Radiohead’s buggy web site to actually pay for it, I know that getting it from a torrent site would have been way easier.
I think the core thing for the music biz to understand is that they need to make getting their music legally to be as easy as getting it illegally. That and remove the DRM. Then maybe people would pay.
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