also, i want to take issue with the author’s characterization of P2P or bittorrent as “illegal downloading.” the author is, as far as i know, not a lawyer, nor does he intend himself as a shill for a particular industry lobby. he may want to refrain from legal pronouncements in the future, especially when they are not vital to his point.

I agree with comments about promotion. When the death of the music industry first became a talked about thing, many years ago now, it became clear that there was a new era in distribution unfolding. But when it comes down to mass marketing, the picture is not so clear. Sure some stuff will go viral on the net without an expensive mainstream media campaign, but even then some of this is due to mainstream media coverage.

In the longterm I am quite interested to see what happens to mass media, if it keeps declining then at some point the era of mass marketing may fall apart and Im not sure if that means the death of all things mega.

Or perhaps nothing so radical will happen, and all we will see is one type of middlemen getting replaced with another.

Actually I suppose my great hope for the internet helping music, would be that talented musicians who would previously have given up and got other jobs after being ignored by the current system, might find a way to generate enough money directly to carry on making music. How they get noticed by enough people is the issue, talent will go a long way but not usually far enough, distribution isnt a problem anymore, effective hype is.

By all relevant metrics, this “experiment” was a complete success. And they got a LOT of people to question many assumptions underlying the current business model, including the “going rate” for a new album of ~$15, the necessity of buying a physical CD at all (granted this has been questioned more and more since iTunes’ debut), the fact that a large band needs millions of marketing dollars budgeted to “support” a new release, and the utility of a big label machine in the current business environment.

This was a fantastic success for both Radiohead and P2P, as EMI’s chairman observes.

To ’sell’ 6x their previous album (at a much reduced retail price but probably more profitable to the band) *and* have millions more copies floating around via p2p for a negligible outlay means their experiment will go down in history as the beginning of the end of the established recording industry.

And from what I’ve picked up, pre-orders for their (expensive) ‘physical’ release are doing very well too.

I’m immensely pleased with the outcome too — and I don’t even like Radiohead…

I want In Rainbows to succeed. Of course I could have gotten it off Radiohead’s site for free. However when Radiohead is looking over the numbers, or listing off the numbers to other people, I don’t want to be another statistic in the ratio of people who downloaded-but-didn’t-pay. I’m not a big Radiohead fan, I’d never really delved into their albums before. However after BitTorrenting the album (for free) I bought it from the site (for $11).

I’m juking the stats for the industry- one less exploitative person for the anti-free-music people to latch onto as to why this didn’t work.

isnt that quite obvious? many bittorrent users (especially private sites) will not settle for crappy 160kbps files (yes you can tell the difference until 192 where it levels off except for some music where you can tell the difference up to 320kbps/lossless formats). in general MP3 terms, 160kbps files are subpar and 192 and up are “considered” cd quality (even though technically they are not).

Piracy is here to stay and theres no stopping it.

It looks like they took the “House of Cards” track to heart which has the lyrics “Infrastructure will collapse” which is what happened when i tried to buy it today

I got it off Bittorrent in the morning and was able to finally pay for it when I got home that night.

Even then it was a very poor ecommerce experience as well that didn’t appear to have much thought put into the process.

That said I still applaud Radiohead and hope other bands follow in their steps. Albeit a little more cautiously.

I’m still torn by this whole ‘free’ music idea. Not because I support what the industry is doing to these artists but simply because I can’t see another viable way for a) these artists to make any money doing it on their own and b) why another company would get involved in sales, marketing and distribution if they’re not going to get a descent share of the pie.

In my opinion, people who illegally download the tracks via P2P networks or illegally burn a copy from a friend don’t truly appreciate the artist at all (okay, if you went back and legally bought it you’re forgiven). Yes these people appreciate the music but not the effort it took to create and promote it. It’s this attitude that has to change - the attitude that the Web largely supports, that even though we see tremendous value in a product/service, we shouldn’t have to pay for it. “Just add advertising and make it free”.

To me this Radiohead effort is a little overrated. If it weren’t for their previous popularity they wouldn’t have generated the huge amount of press that made this effort of theirs a success (or is it?). And who was responsible for their previous success? A fair chunk of it a record label (or multiple labels). I’d like to know what they actually made from their 1.2 million sales. Are the sales (remember you could have paid 0 pounds for this) greater than what they would of made on their previous album (selling 300,000 for a fee)?

Either way, I think the industry does need to change. It’s going to be fun to watch it go through this process. And no, I don’t know the perfect answer either.

A key and not fully explored point here is that unlike nearly all other groups, Radiohead has now given their fans a clear way to send them a direct signal of support, tailored to that individual fan’s own budget.

I am probably going to buy the digital album, likely for about $10 - in no small part because lots of my friends have been raving about the album and I want to support Radiohead’s move. I hope that besides releasing the raw number of sales they also release some details about average price and other stats (and ideally release the full dataset to researchers for other analysis).

Those numbers are from BigChampagne, which has been tracking P2P transfers for quite a while. Their clients include most of the major record labels. Their methodology is pretty solid (their CEO gave a presentation to some people at my company including me).

David

I think music’s current state needs a more pragmatic approach than continuing the debate over intellectual property rights. Piracy is here and the costs of enforcing these laws seem extremely expensive, even just domestically. It took the RIAA a long time and a lot of money to bring just their first case to court. That doesn’t even consider the costs of enforcing it internationally.

I also don’t think it’s worth the money for 160kpbs MP3, when a CD sounds much better to me and costs only $3-5 more.

Radiohead = True passion.

All of you techies and entrepreneurs aren’t 100% about the money making… same thing applies to radio head.

Cheers to them and the entire recording industry!

~ Jessica Mah

Sorry, Nick, trolling post.

(and yes, I bought the album.)