Radiohead’s New Album
I don’t listen to Radiohead, never have. Not because I hate them just because I don’t listen to soft-rock or rock or metal, just not my type of music. So this post isn’t on Radiohead themselves to critique them but more on their new album experiment.
For anyone who isn’t aware, they’ve released their new album online as apposed to releasing it commercially in stores. What they’re actually doing is allowing their fans to define how much they are willing to pay for the album. So people could literally, if they wanted. Pay nothing. So… about as useful as having it floating around the web illegally anyway!
But I do think this is a great innovative attempt to continue to make money from music sales. They’ve realised like basically everyone else that people just don’t buy records like they used to and downloading them for free is as easy as ever. So I think their true nerdy fans might actually pay something for it… don’t know why you would when you have the option to legally… pay zero! but… that’s just me lol.
Then again, if I actually really like an artist. Like enough to pay for them, I would only ever pay for the physical CD anyway. Just for the sake of having the actual thing, collection wise. With the theme of it and the book etc. So I think this may be a disadvantage for them. I would never pay for a download. Something that is so easily downloadable anyway and something they are offering you to legally download for nothing if you want.
Anyone got any thoughts on this?
Apparently, the average price paid for the download version was around £4.
Wow, surprised anybody payed anything. But then again there are a lot of people which will pay for digital music, itunes is a great example of that.
It restores my faith in humanity a little to see people pay for it even when they don’t have to.
But then again, Radiohead’s fan base is stereotypically “middle class student” (myself not included), so they’ve got a fair bit of ££ to throw around.