SubscribeThe Radiohead Aftermath
Posted in Music, News on October 18th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Last week Radiohead started distributing their latest album on DRM free MP3’s, but most importantly, they let users name their price. Almost 2 million downloads later, this week, the theme of the most interesting media & technology articles and blogposts still was Radiohead. Here’s the highlights and the best of them.
Seth Godin, whom we frequently link to, asked himself why did it take so long and why is it Radiohead, Prince and Madonna who are innovating in regards to industry adaptation.
Most industries innovate from both ends:
* The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
* The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
* It’s the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches.The mediocre record companies, mediocre A&R guys and the mediocre acts are struggling to stay in place. (…) The irony, of course, is that by jumping in last, they’re condemning themselves to more mediocrity.
Valleywag thought instead of the possibility of taking the idea of name your own price to the Gaming industry. Afterall, music and videogames share some similarities in distribution. Their conclusion is clear:
Radiohead has stirred up a lot of hoopla with its name-your-own-price album download In Rainbows. Naturally, the curious wonder whether the do it yourself model can be transferred to videogames. The answer: no. (Valleywag)
Chris Anderson however doesn’t agree (see the original article for links to each of Anderson’s counterarguments):
Valleywag says that videogames, unlike music, can’t be made free because there’s no sideline business in which to make money, like music’s concert tour or merchandise sales. Oh really? What about advertising? Or land? Or additional levels? Or clothing and furniture? Or the various powerups, gold, armor, characters and other upgrades options that allow all these online multiplayer games to be free?
This GigaOm article further studies the possibility of the Gaming industry following Radiohead’s lead by looking at what consumers want (Freedom) versus what Producers require (Control) and the idea of downloads as loss leaders.
Finally, we highlight the following quotes from this TechCrunch article:
However, free doesn’t seem cheap enough. Despite the potentially free download, over 240,000 users got the album from peer to peer BitTorrent networks on the first day of release, according to Forbes. (…) File sharing networks are expected to surpass legal downloads in the coming days.
And from the article’s comments:
Andrew’s comment:
Radiohead’s website adds too many steps to download the album. Bit torrent websites do not ask for your personal information and only take a couple clicks to download making it much more attractive.
Mark’s comment:
A number of people have admitted to getting the album on bitTorrent because the site was so bogged down the day of release, and some of those people said they went back and paid for the album after.
And Chris’ comment:
Their album goes platnium in a week, outselling their previous album by a factor of 6. They prevent the leaked version from escaping into the wild (and, even more significantly, prevented the unmastered tracks from leaking, like what happened with Hail to the Thief). And they kept 100% of the profit from their mp3 sales, as opposed to the $1.50-$2.50 per album they would have gotten through a label.
By all relevant metrics, this “experiment” was a complete success. And they got a LOT of people to question many assumptions underlying the current business model, including the “going rate” for a new album of ~$15, the necessity of buying a physical CD at all (granted this has been questioned more and more since iTunes’ debut), the fact that a large band needs millions of marketing dollars budgeted to “support” a new release, and the utility of a big label machine in the current business environment.
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