Frontman Thom Yorke calls it a “one-off response to a particular situation.”
Six months after Radiohead shocked the music industry by letting fans decide how much to pay for their album “In Rainbows” the plan has become fairly accepted as a practical means of connecting with fans while still making money and better still – music on one’s own terms.
Yesterday, Coldplay even got into the act by announcing that it was offering a free digital download of their new single “Violet Hill,” though is still oddly reverting to a paid purchase after a week’s time. Thus far it’s reported to have been downloaded some 600,000 times.
“What we’re seeing is the emergence of a new business model for established, superstar acts,” music guru Alan Cross said Tuesday of Coldplay’s heavily hyped return to the spotlight.
“They realize that they have, already, over years, built up a very tight relationship with their audiences and that they have the power and the infrastructure to reach out to them directly.”
It was almost two months ago now that NIN, one of the biggest proponents of file-sharing, uploaded Vol 1 of Ghosts I-IV to The Pirate Bay for BitTorrent users to download for free.
Even Metallica, long considered the most vocal critic of file-sharing, said it was considering using the medium as well. “We’ve been observing Radiohead and Trent Reznor and in twenty-seven years or however long it takes for the next record, we’ll be looking forward to everything in terms of possibilities with the Internet,” it said in an interview.
So just when you though that a new era of music distribution may be in the works Radiohead, the pioneer of sorts, now says it won’t be repeating its previous initiative that let fans decide what to pay to download their album. Thom Yorke, the English rock band’s frontman, now says in a recent interview that “I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation.”
“Yes. It was a one-off in terms of a story. It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time,” Yorke told the Hollywood Reporter.
I’m not sure how it will play out with fans of the band, but it does imply that the experiment wasn’t as profitable as they would’ve liked for it to have been. Why else would they decide that it was a “one-off response” if it gave the band artistic freedom, a direct connection with fans, AND money to boot!
I don’t think Radiohead plans to diverge from the sort of direct connection that digital distribution has given them for Yorke continues in the interview by stressing its importance. “We are about that direct relationship (now) because we are big enough to establish that,” he said.
That said, it may just be that it really came down to a matter of dollars and cents, or pounds and shillings in this case.
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I’ve got to agree with mountain_rage on this one. It was reported in rolling stone that the band earned anywhere between 6 and 8 million dollars from the “pay what you wish” schematic.
The average paying customer chose to chip in 6 bucks.
I smell fish
correction above:
“Artists do summer” …. should be “Artists do SUFFER”.
i’ve had few glasses of whisky tonight
What radiohead did was merely an experiment. The fact remains that a new business-model (for online music sales & profits) still needs to be developed and no one really knows not even the RIAA how to come up with one. Internet is still new but it sure has changed the world and consumer behavior in no time. Paradigm shift!
One thing that has been exposed about the RIAA is their obscene profit margins based on the old model and that their signed-artists get only a few pennies royalties from every CD sold and the rest goes to the major labels.
One thing that is a fact about RIAA is that they do believe ALL consumers are potential thieves when given the chance to acquire music for free by any convenient means. And I think they were right. But that doesn’t excuse RIAA’s approach to punish the consumers with lawsuits.
Let’s face it …. a lot of people do want free media (and the majority have done so) from the internet without paying a dime for the content. Artists do summer. Internet has in fact dented music sales from record stores due to the majority of people out there who download and not pay for music tracks although only few of them actually pay for legit download-tracks and CD’s (for example avid music collectors).
The internet is still new unregulated and has exposed all sorts of new realities such as: (1) the ability for the mainstream public to access and download free music (and other copy-righted media); (2) changing global consumer behavior in general; (3) consumers can be thieves; (4) making the old music business model archaic; (5) exposing RIAA’s long-time control of consumers; (6) exposing RIAA’s unfair contracts with their signed artists who get only few pennies from music sales while RIAA pockets the rest; (7) the artists were ripped off by RIAA’s traditional business model; (8) artists are also not getting their deserved income from the internet (PSP sharing free downloads etc) because the majority of the downloaders are not paying anything (stealing); (9) although iTunes is the first to succeed in sales download-sales of music but apple gets to keep a huge portion of every sale the major labels keep the rest and the artists still gets next to nothing (hence it is still the major corporations who get to keep all monies from sales); and finally (9) there’s still room to experiment and come up with all different kinds of new business models in music sales especially on the internet as well in regards to ever-changing new market trends. The list can go on.
In regards to metallica’s changed point of view on downloads ….. well they were right about what they did back in 2000. What they saw was the demise of music sales in the future. A lot of people did jump on the chance to download hundreds or thousands of music tracks for free. There is no denying that there are people out there who do not want to admit that the only reason they support p2p is to get free music and movies. However that does not mean p2p and file-sharing (in general) should be stopped.
It’s just a matter of adaptation.
@Mountain Rage
The RIAA’s done so much shady stuff over the years you just might not be too far off the mark.
I’m going to start a wonky conspiracy. They changed their mind because the music industry paid them big to do so. Apparently the RIAA didn’t like all the attention it got and felt threatened.