Radiohead - Stop Whispering (Limited Edition)
1. Stop Whispering 4:12
2. Creep (Acoustic) 4:21
3. Pop Is Dead 2:14
4. Inside My Head (Live) 3:05
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Radiohead - Stop Whispering (Limited Edition)
Radiohead - Stop Whispering (Limited Edition)
1. Stop Whispering 4:12
2. Creep (Acoustic) 4:21
3. Pop Is Dead 2:14
4. Inside My Head (Live) 3:05
E-readers should be celebrated by publishers: internet expert
MARK COLVIN: Over the last decade and a half the World Wide Web has revolutionised huge areas of life.
And that revolution is continuing to cause upheaval in all kinds of businesses.
The music and film industries are fighting what looks like a rearguard action against illegal downloading, while a whole generation becomes accustomed to the idea that all kinds of content should be free.
Newspapers are on the ropes, many caught between their own massive debts and the loss of the rivers of gold they used to get from classified advertising.
It feels to some as though industries are being swept away, and the jobs and profits that went with them too.
Lawrence Lessig is Professor of Law at Stanford in the US, and he's strongly identified with the camp that welcomes the freedom of the internet.
I asked him this afternoon if the widespread transition to free downloading was going to go on causing crises in a number of industries.
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah. But what is causing the crises in this context is just people choosing to consume or to get access to content differently. So, we used to have a world where you know, there were a couple of major media outlets that basically controlled the audience; that doesn't exist anymore.
We have a very fragmented audience, people have very different tastes, they consume lots of different kinds of music. The diversity of content that they get access to is much higher today than it was 20 years ago.
Now that hurts some people but it helps a whole bunch of other people. There are more people making money on music today than there were 20 years ago and that's because digital technologies has increased the diversity and availability of this content in ways that make diverse content happy and mainstream content less happy.
MARK COLVIN: How can you say... what figures do you have to back that up?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well if you, there's work done by a researcher from the Consumers Union in the United States, Mark Cooper, who studied the distribution of sales of music on iTunes and the kind of content that gets distributed and the actual source revenue that goes back to artists and what he's showing is that the number of artists who are making money on music today is higher than it was; he's talking less than 20 years ago, 10 years ago.
Now of course the amount of money that Britney Spears is making or Madonna is making is less than what they were making before but I'm not sure we should be troubled by the fact that multi-millionaires are making less than multi-millions, maybe only one million, we should be more excited by the fact that there are more people who are actually able to make money with their music than was possible 10 years ago.
MARK COLVIN: Is it also going more to the artists and less to the record companies? Is that why we hear such angry noises from the record companies?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah. The record companies' business model - which was every couple of years selling a new platform for the same music; so records and then cassettes tapes and then CDs, then DVDs - that business model is over and they don't like the fact that they don't have this comfortable happy business model.
And you know I understand that; I have tenure, I would be very upset if somebody took away my tenure, and they had a kind of business tenure.
But just because that particular kind of business model is finished it doesn't mean that artists are finished. Obviously artists will continue forever and they'll have different ways of making money with their art and what we're seeing is many more artists who are going directly to their fans and making money directly from their fans.
So artists like Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead or Girl Talk; these are artists who have an enormous fan base, they make their music available, Girl talk and Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails all make their music available freely for people to download if they'd like but they also have the option of buying it.
These people make, and you know Radiohead made $1.6-million in one week selling their latest album that was also available for free to download. The number one download on Mp3salem MP3 last year was a Creative Commons licensed track that was available for free as well as to be bought.
So these are artists who are experimenting with different ways to succeed in their business and it might not make record companies happy but I think that diversity is something we should be celebrating.
MARK COLVIN: There's a whole bunch of e-readers coming out - ones called the Kindle - they're ways of reading books electronically. Are they going to wreck the publishing industry the way that free music has wrecked the record industry?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: No not at all. So the Kindle, I have a Kindle, is early stage technology for replacing the physically printed books. Now, as somebody who writes books, I believe books are an essential part to understanding culture. Right, there are some things you can't explain in 10 seconds or in 800 words.
So we've got to find a way to make books relevant, so the Kindle makes it much easier to get access to this content. There's actually a very interesting text reading facility built into the books so that you can listen to your book as you're driving to work or as you're riding on the train and so that's making that form of expression accessible in the digital age, and I think that's an important part of keeping it relevant.
If we didn't do that, then people would read fewer books, they would spend more time reading blogs or spend more time doing Twitter and things like that.
MARK COLVIN: But you're going to be able to download free books presumably onto your Kindle pretty soon aren't you? In just the same way that...
LAWRENCE LESSIG: No the Kindle's actually much more heavily controlled in this sense than the Internet was. So the Kindle, you can only get content into the Kindle in certain channels and the Kindle controls the copy protection technology to block the ability to easily download content onto your Kindle.
MARK COLVIN: But just like the iPod - and there were other MP3 players - there will be other e-readers than the Kindle and people will start stealing books won't they?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: I'm sure people will start stealing books, but the question is do book publishers benefit from a world where people can get access to books more easily, even if they're stealing more books in that world than they would in a world where the only way we get access to the books is the way that we did in 1975?
And I think the answer is book publishers are going to be better off in the world of Kindle, even if more people are downloading stuff illegally, than they would be if they continued to try to preserve the world of 1975.
MARK COLVIN: Are you optimistic about the electronic future?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Overall I think there's certain things that I'm worried about and many more things that I'm very optimistic about.
I'm very worried about journalism as I said; real true investigative journalism. I think you know blogs provide some part of that but certainly nothing to the level of what we need.
On the other hand, a lot of people are sceptical whether even today we have that kind of journalism in the broad street press and so I might be over emphasising this concern. But that's one thing I'm concerned about.
But I am extremely optimistic about the future of the arts, not the record companies but the arts; the ability of people to create and share their creativity and to profit from their creativity I think is greater now than it certainly seemed possible even just 10 years ago and that's something that we need to be encouraging and we need to encourage it by making it possible for more people to do this legally.
You know, one of the features of copyright law that I'm working so hard to change is the way in which it criminalises behaviour that is creative behaviour. I'm not talking about people downloading content illegally, I'm talking about people remixing or making content, making new content which is just regulated under the existing law in a way that renders it illegal. And there's no reason for the law to do that, it's just a by-product of it being an archaic law applied to digital technologies and we should be changing it so that we can be encouraging and teaching our kids how to use this technology legally.
And that revolution is continuing to cause upheaval in all kinds of businesses.
The music and film industries are fighting what looks like a rearguard action against illegal downloading, while a whole generation becomes accustomed to the idea that all kinds of content should be free.
Newspapers are on the ropes, many caught between their own massive debts and the loss of the rivers of gold they used to get from classified advertising.
It feels to some as though industries are being swept away, and the jobs and profits that went with them too.
Lawrence Lessig is Professor of Law at Stanford in the US, and he's strongly identified with the camp that welcomes the freedom of the internet.
I asked him this afternoon if the widespread transition to free downloading was going to go on causing crises in a number of industries.
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah. But what is causing the crises in this context is just people choosing to consume or to get access to content differently. So, we used to have a world where you know, there were a couple of major media outlets that basically controlled the audience; that doesn't exist anymore.
We have a very fragmented audience, people have very different tastes, they consume lots of different kinds of music. The diversity of content that they get access to is much higher today than it was 20 years ago.
Now that hurts some people but it helps a whole bunch of other people. There are more people making money on music today than there were 20 years ago and that's because digital technologies has increased the diversity and availability of this content in ways that make diverse content happy and mainstream content less happy.
MARK COLVIN: How can you say... what figures do you have to back that up?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well if you, there's work done by a researcher from the Consumers Union in the United States, Mark Cooper, who studied the distribution of sales of music on iTunes and the kind of content that gets distributed and the actual source revenue that goes back to artists and what he's showing is that the number of artists who are making money on music today is higher than it was; he's talking less than 20 years ago, 10 years ago.
Now of course the amount of money that Britney Spears is making or Madonna is making is less than what they were making before but I'm not sure we should be troubled by the fact that multi-millionaires are making less than multi-millions, maybe only one million, we should be more excited by the fact that there are more people who are actually able to make money with their music than was possible 10 years ago.
MARK COLVIN: Is it also going more to the artists and less to the record companies? Is that why we hear such angry noises from the record companies?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah. The record companies' business model - which was every couple of years selling a new platform for the same music; so records and then cassettes tapes and then CDs, then DVDs - that business model is over and they don't like the fact that they don't have this comfortable happy business model.
And you know I understand that; I have tenure, I would be very upset if somebody took away my tenure, and they had a kind of business tenure.
But just because that particular kind of business model is finished it doesn't mean that artists are finished. Obviously artists will continue forever and they'll have different ways of making money with their art and what we're seeing is many more artists who are going directly to their fans and making money directly from their fans.
So artists like Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead or Girl Talk; these are artists who have an enormous fan base, they make their music available, Girl talk and Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails all make their music available freely for people to download if they'd like but they also have the option of buying it.
These people make, and you know Radiohead made $1.6-million in one week selling their latest album that was also available for free to download. The number one download on Mp3salem MP3 last year was a Creative Commons licensed track that was available for free as well as to be bought.
So these are artists who are experimenting with different ways to succeed in their business and it might not make record companies happy but I think that diversity is something we should be celebrating.
MARK COLVIN: There's a whole bunch of e-readers coming out - ones called the Kindle - they're ways of reading books electronically. Are they going to wreck the publishing industry the way that free music has wrecked the record industry?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: No not at all. So the Kindle, I have a Kindle, is early stage technology for replacing the physically printed books. Now, as somebody who writes books, I believe books are an essential part to understanding culture. Right, there are some things you can't explain in 10 seconds or in 800 words.
So we've got to find a way to make books relevant, so the Kindle makes it much easier to get access to this content. There's actually a very interesting text reading facility built into the books so that you can listen to your book as you're driving to work or as you're riding on the train and so that's making that form of expression accessible in the digital age, and I think that's an important part of keeping it relevant.
If we didn't do that, then people would read fewer books, they would spend more time reading blogs or spend more time doing Twitter and things like that.
MARK COLVIN: But you're going to be able to download free books presumably onto your Kindle pretty soon aren't you? In just the same way that...
LAWRENCE LESSIG: No the Kindle's actually much more heavily controlled in this sense than the Internet was. So the Kindle, you can only get content into the Kindle in certain channels and the Kindle controls the copy protection technology to block the ability to easily download content onto your Kindle.
MARK COLVIN: But just like the iPod - and there were other MP3 players - there will be other e-readers than the Kindle and people will start stealing books won't they?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: I'm sure people will start stealing books, but the question is do book publishers benefit from a world where people can get access to books more easily, even if they're stealing more books in that world than they would in a world where the only way we get access to the books is the way that we did in 1975?
And I think the answer is book publishers are going to be better off in the world of Kindle, even if more people are downloading stuff illegally, than they would be if they continued to try to preserve the world of 1975.
MARK COLVIN: Are you optimistic about the electronic future?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Overall I think there's certain things that I'm worried about and many more things that I'm very optimistic about.
I'm very worried about journalism as I said; real true investigative journalism. I think you know blogs provide some part of that but certainly nothing to the level of what we need.
On the other hand, a lot of people are sceptical whether even today we have that kind of journalism in the broad street press and so I might be over emphasising this concern. But that's one thing I'm concerned about.
But I am extremely optimistic about the future of the arts, not the record companies but the arts; the ability of people to create and share their creativity and to profit from their creativity I think is greater now than it certainly seemed possible even just 10 years ago and that's something that we need to be encouraging and we need to encourage it by making it possible for more people to do this legally.
You know, one of the features of copyright law that I'm working so hard to change is the way in which it criminalises behaviour that is creative behaviour. I'm not talking about people downloading content illegally, I'm talking about people remixing or making content, making new content which is just regulated under the existing law in a way that renders it illegal. And there's no reason for the law to do that, it's just a by-product of it being an archaic law applied to digital technologies and we should be changing it so that we can be encouraging and teaching our kids how to use this technology legally.
If Free is the Enemy of Good, Then Color Me Bad
Paul McGuinness, manager of U2, has found a new enemy of music artists and creativity in general: free. After firing against hippy technology and internet executives back in January 2008, he turned to ISPs, calling them shoplifters, going so far as to elicit an apology from Bono, who distanced himself and the band from McGuinness’ statements.
Now, he’s given a rather mellow interview to Cnet, partly contradicting his earlier statements (he criticized Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” business model earlier, but now claims he admires “what Radiohead have done tremendously in seeking a new model”), and partly repeating his earlier claims (with a bit more tact, this time) that the Internet should be regulated and monitored, and that the ISPs should be forced to do it.
However, he manages to step in it again, ending the interview with a very interesting statement: Ultimately, he says, free is the enemy of good.”
This sentence shows that he simply has no idea (actually, I don’t believe that; I think he’s merely refusing to admit the obvious) about how business works. In any business, there’s a lot of things that are provided free to the customer. Your ISP probably provides free 24 hour phone and email support to you. In your local supermarket, you can sample various products, like cheese or cosmetics, for free. Some companies provide free WiFi coverage around their headquarters. The list goes on. Free is an essential component of every business, and free does not mean “without value.”
Now, if an ISP wants to start charging for customer support, they’re welcome to try. They’re also welcome to file for bankruptcy when all of their customers move to another, friendlier ISP. The entertainment industry is welcome to try and charge (and even McGuinness admits that they’ve been charging way too much) for easily duplicated digital goods, such as MP3s, lyrics, tabs etc. But if they don’t provide enough added value to the customer, they’ll go out of business. If, however, they embrace free - and we now have many great examples of how free content can be used to promote scarce goods - and try to figure out new business models which Internet has unlocked, they will thrive.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
How Radiohead’s Business Model Shook Up the Music Industry
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Greg Kot’s new book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (Scribner, $25). Ripped tells the story of a new grassroots music industry, created by the laptop generation, with the fans and bands in charge. In this excerpt, Radiohead reinvents the way in which it distributes music directly to its fans.
Whenever he considered the possibility of Radiohead going into business for itself, guitarist Jonny Greenwood got a little queasy. “It makes me think we’re gonna be sitting in endless business meetings talking about how to do it off our own backs, rather than sitting in studios recording music.”
cover art
Greg Kot
Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music
(Scribner; US: May 2009)
Amazon
But Radiohead was genuinely unsettled by what it saw as the major labels’ inability to adapt to the marketplace. The long lag time imposed by the majors between finishing an album and actually releasing it to set up a proper big-budget marketing campaign was particularly irritating. The band appreciated that its fans were almost ridiculously vigilant. As soon as word would get out that Radiohead had finished working on an album, the Internet began to buzz with anticipation. A leak of the new music would inevitably follow, and Radiohead fans were soon sharing the music and debating its merits.
Inevitably, Web sites would jump in with their critiques of the still-unreleased work.
It was flattering and yet frustrating for the band; increasingly, they sensed the problem was not with the fans, but with their label’s inability to keep up with how fans were consuming music.
By the fall of 2007, Radiohead had a new album ready to go, but still hadn’t pulled the trigger on any kind of record deal. It decided to release the album anyway, through its Web site. On Oct. 1, Jonny Greenwood posted a terse announcement on radiohead.com: “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days. We’ve called it In Rainbows.”
So much for the big marketing plan. In the land of the major labels, Greenwood would’ve been drummed out of the public-relations academy for his utter offhandedness. For an artist of Radiohead’s stature, it was customary for a big label to plot out the details of an album months in advance, to line up shelf space at retail stores, programming at commercial radio, and full-page ads and interviews in Billboard, Rolling Stone, and the usual print-media suspects. But for the first time in its existence, Radiohead had no such constraints. It could now effectively function as its own record company, record store, and distribution service rolled into one — at least temporarily. So Radiohead instructed its fans that on Oct. 10, it would provide an access code to a digital download of the new album to any customer willing to part with an e-mail address.
The price was left to the customer’s discretion, the virtual equivalent of a giant tip jar.
“It’s up to you,” the checkout screen read for preordering the 10-song disc.
Also available to order was an expanded, physical version of the album, to ship two months later. Priced at the U.S. equivalent of $81, it would include an 18-track double album packaged in both CD and vinyl versions, with lyrics, artwork, and photographs in a hardback book and slipcase.
Radiohead’s distribution strategy for In Rainbows reduced the decade-long debate over Internet downloading to a single, deceptively simple question: “What’s this piece of music really worth to you?” It was a question that respected the intelligence of the potential buyer, a question that bristled with moral, ethical, economic and aesthetic considerations. And yet it was a question that could be answered with a simple mouse click, in prices ranging from $0.00 to $99.99 (the order form didn’t accommodate three-digit dollar figures).
It was a brilliant move made even more potent by its timing. Only a week before, a federal jury in Minnesota had awarded the record industry a $220,000 judgment against Jammie Thomas for the crime of downloading 24 copyrighted songs and making them available for file sharing. Thomas was hardly alone. At the very moment her verdict was being read, more than 9 million consumers were sharing music files around America, according to media management company BigChampagne.
As one of the more marketable names in the business, Radiohead was in a position where it didn’t have to give away anything. It had the cachet to charge $10 or more for its music, and rest assured that most of its fans would gladly pay. But it clearly wanted no part of a music industry that labels its own customers as thieves. By declaring, “It’s up to you,” Radiohead made it clear whose side it was on.
The Internet exploded with Radiohead-related chatter. In the three days after the announcement, blogpulse.com, a search engine that reports on daily blog activity, showed more than a 1,300 percent increase in the number of posts mentioning the band.
The behind-the-scenes mechanics of the deal were intriguing, all the more so because Radiohead really wasn’t interested in talking about them—perhaps because it might’ve appeared unseemly to gloat. The band stood to profit handsomely from any paid download.
What’s more, they didn’t have to share the money with any middlemen.
Ken Waagner, the tech guru for Wilco, estimated that Radiohead spent $5,000 to $10,000 to process the flood of orders and downloads on its Web site. Those distribution costs are minimal compared with what pioneers such as Prince faced a decade ago when fans ordered CDs from his Web site. Rather than e-mailing a code to customers leading them to a download page, Prince had to manufacture, package, and ship CDs, and struggled to keep up with demand.
Prince, like Radiohead, was able to pull it off because he had a large fan base for his music built up over years of promotion and marketing by a major label before he went into business for himself. This factor often was overlooked in media coverage of Radiohead’s new business model, but it was critical to its success.
“Radiohead’s developed a pretty good brand name over the years,” Allman Brothers Band manager Bert Holman says.
“There’s artistic merit, but they also had a major label doing a lot of marketing for them. They’re in a position where, of course, they can do something like this. And so could a few others—U2, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews. These are bands that benefited from the old system. But it’s not really applicable to reinventing the music business.”
Radiohead didn’t want to lead a revolution. Its goal was far more modest: to leak its own album, give fans a taste of the new music, and invite them to buy the sonically superior physical product once it became available in a few months. If the band screwed up, it was in offering In Rainbows in the form of relatively low-fidelity 160 kilobits per second MP3s.
A year after the release of In Rainbows, the big numbers started to roll in. The album had sold 3 million copies, including downloads from radiohead.com, according to the band’s publisher, Warner/Chappell.
The sales from the band’s Web site alone exceeded the total sales for the band’s previous album, Hail to the Thief. The figures included 100,000 limited-edition box sets, sold at the U.S. equivalent of $81—an $8 million haul, with the band keeping most of the profits. The publicity windfall helped ensure one of the most successful tours of 2008, with the band playing to 1.2 million fans.
It was an impressive accomplishment, if only an intriguing first step in a new direction for the business as a whole. This revolution, as successful as it was, could have used a few tweaks: the low-bit-rate digital release was slipshod; after two months, the Radiohead Web site stopped offering the name-your-price MP3 files; and the band ended up tying its fate to a traditional record label (albeit an independent one) rather than pioneering a new marketplace dynamic.
Whenever he considered the possibility of Radiohead going into business for itself, guitarist Jonny Greenwood got a little queasy. “It makes me think we’re gonna be sitting in endless business meetings talking about how to do it off our own backs, rather than sitting in studios recording music.”
cover art
Greg Kot
Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music
(Scribner; US: May 2009)
Amazon
But Radiohead was genuinely unsettled by what it saw as the major labels’ inability to adapt to the marketplace. The long lag time imposed by the majors between finishing an album and actually releasing it to set up a proper big-budget marketing campaign was particularly irritating. The band appreciated that its fans were almost ridiculously vigilant. As soon as word would get out that Radiohead had finished working on an album, the Internet began to buzz with anticipation. A leak of the new music would inevitably follow, and Radiohead fans were soon sharing the music and debating its merits.
Inevitably, Web sites would jump in with their critiques of the still-unreleased work.
It was flattering and yet frustrating for the band; increasingly, they sensed the problem was not with the fans, but with their label’s inability to keep up with how fans were consuming music.
By the fall of 2007, Radiohead had a new album ready to go, but still hadn’t pulled the trigger on any kind of record deal. It decided to release the album anyway, through its Web site. On Oct. 1, Jonny Greenwood posted a terse announcement on radiohead.com: “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days. We’ve called it In Rainbows.”
So much for the big marketing plan. In the land of the major labels, Greenwood would’ve been drummed out of the public-relations academy for his utter offhandedness. For an artist of Radiohead’s stature, it was customary for a big label to plot out the details of an album months in advance, to line up shelf space at retail stores, programming at commercial radio, and full-page ads and interviews in Billboard, Rolling Stone, and the usual print-media suspects. But for the first time in its existence, Radiohead had no such constraints. It could now effectively function as its own record company, record store, and distribution service rolled into one — at least temporarily. So Radiohead instructed its fans that on Oct. 10, it would provide an access code to a digital download of the new album to any customer willing to part with an e-mail address.
The price was left to the customer’s discretion, the virtual equivalent of a giant tip jar.
“It’s up to you,” the checkout screen read for preordering the 10-song disc.
Also available to order was an expanded, physical version of the album, to ship two months later. Priced at the U.S. equivalent of $81, it would include an 18-track double album packaged in both CD and vinyl versions, with lyrics, artwork, and photographs in a hardback book and slipcase.
Radiohead’s distribution strategy for In Rainbows reduced the decade-long debate over Internet downloading to a single, deceptively simple question: “What’s this piece of music really worth to you?” It was a question that respected the intelligence of the potential buyer, a question that bristled with moral, ethical, economic and aesthetic considerations. And yet it was a question that could be answered with a simple mouse click, in prices ranging from $0.00 to $99.99 (the order form didn’t accommodate three-digit dollar figures).
It was a brilliant move made even more potent by its timing. Only a week before, a federal jury in Minnesota had awarded the record industry a $220,000 judgment against Jammie Thomas for the crime of downloading 24 copyrighted songs and making them available for file sharing. Thomas was hardly alone. At the very moment her verdict was being read, more than 9 million consumers were sharing music files around America, according to media management company BigChampagne.
As one of the more marketable names in the business, Radiohead was in a position where it didn’t have to give away anything. It had the cachet to charge $10 or more for its music, and rest assured that most of its fans would gladly pay. But it clearly wanted no part of a music industry that labels its own customers as thieves. By declaring, “It’s up to you,” Radiohead made it clear whose side it was on.
The Internet exploded with Radiohead-related chatter. In the three days after the announcement, blogpulse.com, a search engine that reports on daily blog activity, showed more than a 1,300 percent increase in the number of posts mentioning the band.
The behind-the-scenes mechanics of the deal were intriguing, all the more so because Radiohead really wasn’t interested in talking about them—perhaps because it might’ve appeared unseemly to gloat. The band stood to profit handsomely from any paid download.
What’s more, they didn’t have to share the money with any middlemen.
Ken Waagner, the tech guru for Wilco, estimated that Radiohead spent $5,000 to $10,000 to process the flood of orders and downloads on its Web site. Those distribution costs are minimal compared with what pioneers such as Prince faced a decade ago when fans ordered CDs from his Web site. Rather than e-mailing a code to customers leading them to a download page, Prince had to manufacture, package, and ship CDs, and struggled to keep up with demand.
Prince, like Radiohead, was able to pull it off because he had a large fan base for his music built up over years of promotion and marketing by a major label before he went into business for himself. This factor often was overlooked in media coverage of Radiohead’s new business model, but it was critical to its success.
“Radiohead’s developed a pretty good brand name over the years,” Allman Brothers Band manager Bert Holman says.
“There’s artistic merit, but they also had a major label doing a lot of marketing for them. They’re in a position where, of course, they can do something like this. And so could a few others—U2, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews. These are bands that benefited from the old system. But it’s not really applicable to reinventing the music business.”
Radiohead didn’t want to lead a revolution. Its goal was far more modest: to leak its own album, give fans a taste of the new music, and invite them to buy the sonically superior physical product once it became available in a few months. If the band screwed up, it was in offering In Rainbows in the form of relatively low-fidelity 160 kilobits per second MP3s.
A year after the release of In Rainbows, the big numbers started to roll in. The album had sold 3 million copies, including downloads from radiohead.com, according to the band’s publisher, Warner/Chappell.
The sales from the band’s Web site alone exceeded the total sales for the band’s previous album, Hail to the Thief. The figures included 100,000 limited-edition box sets, sold at the U.S. equivalent of $81—an $8 million haul, with the band keeping most of the profits. The publicity windfall helped ensure one of the most successful tours of 2008, with the band playing to 1.2 million fans.
It was an impressive accomplishment, if only an intriguing first step in a new direction for the business as a whole. This revolution, as successful as it was, could have used a few tweaks: the low-bit-rate digital release was slipshod; after two months, the Radiohead Web site stopped offering the name-your-price MP3 files; and the band ended up tying its fate to a traditional record label (albeit an independent one) rather than pioneering a new marketplace dynamic.
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