U2 Band Manager: Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' Experiment 'Backfired'

Fresh from trashing Silicon Valley's "liberal hippy values" and extolling the need for ISPs and record labels to forge a "commercial partnership," Paul McGuiness now criticizes Radiohead for daring to think outside the box.

It's impossible to find fault with U2 or frontman Bono considering all his charitable work and tireless efforts for the debt relief of poverty stricken nations, but his manager, Paul McGuiness, sure is making waves among music fans these days.

Late last week I reported how he gave a speech at a Music Matters confab in Hong Kong criticizing ISPs around the globe for not doing more to combat the flow of copyrighted material on their networks.

"One way or another, ISPs and mobile operators are the business partners of the future for the recorded music business – but they are going to have to share the money in a way that reflects what music is doing for their business," he said.

ISPs should have a "...real commercial partnership with the music business in which they fairly share their revenues," he added.

Now if the thought of private business becoming gatekeepers of what is supposed to be the "information superhighway" wasn't bad enough, he goes on to suggest that Silicon Valley's "liberal hippy values" are to blame for not solving the "problem of people paying for music."

"They are fantastic entrepreneurs, wonderful engineers," he says. "Their passion for innovation and liberal hippy values in one sense sit very well with the creativity of the music business. But at a deeper level, there is a bigger problem and it’s one those brilliant minds never resolved: I’m talking about the problem of paying for music."

Now of this wasn't bad enough he gave an interview with BBC's 6 Music recently in which he goes a step further by trashing Radiohead for daring to experiment with a different distribution and payment model that allowed fans to choose how much they wanted to "donate" for a download of their recent "In Rainbows" album.

"We should all be aware that Radiohead's honesty box release of their album to some extent backfired," he said.

"Even though it was available on their own website for no money at all, if that was what you preferred to pay - 60 to 70 per cent of the people who downloaded the record stole it anyway even though it was available for free."

Now the figures he cites - 60-70% - are neither proven nor disproven since Radiohead never actually released any sales figures showing just how many people who downloaded the album actually paid for it or how much they paid.

According to Wired estimates range from $10 million USD on the high end to $2.4 million USD on the other. Either way, the money went ENTIRELY to RADIOHEAD making any band surely envious.

He doesn't say how it "backfired," but isn't doing nothing, as has been the record industry norm for almost a decade now, clearly already backfired? Criticizing Radiohead for daring to try out a new distribution and payment model solidifies their image as an industry that cares not about music fans nor artists, but rather about the revenue each generate for shareholders and executives on the payroll.