Radiohead Serial Disruption
By A.M. Schmidt, BAVC Martketing Strategist
Last night I downloaded the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows, for 2 pounds forty-five, the equivalent of about five US dollars. Of course, I could have downloaded it for a penny. Or I could have paid 100 pounds (the maximum accepted by the independent site at http://www.inrainbows.com/.). Last week, Radiohead announced that they were going to let fans decide how much they want to pay for the album. I’m normally a cheap bastard (though I prefer thrifty since I live on a non-profit salary) who secretly downloads music for free (shhh), but when I signed on at the Radiohead site, I did feel like I should pay something, even a little something. I mean, they are artists, after all, trying to make a living. And the truth is, that little something that I paid them, is probably more per album than they would have made licensing the music to iTunes through a record label. And, the truth is that most folks feel like music is worth something. In fact, the average amount paid by Radiohead buyers to date has been rumored to be right about $5. And more than a few folks paid the maximum $100 pounds (in a sort of backhanded indictment of the current state of the music industry). Not bad for a pay-what-you-want experiment.
Of course, the model isn’t new. Some folks speculate that it was inspired by a classic honor system as described in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s bestseller Freakonomics. But sliding scale has been around in the punk and activist communities forever. As a teenager growing up in Washington, DC, I remember going to countless pay-what-you-want punk rock benefit shows and always shuffling my feet as I put down $5.
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5 comments October 16, 2007
