Most fans paid $0 for Radiohead album
By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer
1 hour, 17 minutes ago


LOS ANGELES - Radiohead let its fans decide how much to pay for a digital copy of the band's latest release, "In Rainbows," and more than half of those who downloaded the album chose to pay nothing, according to a study by a consumer research firm.

Some 62 percent of the people who downloaded "In Rainbows" in a four-week period last month opted not to pay the British alt-rockers a cent. But the remaining 38 percent voluntarily paid an average of $6, according to the study by comScore Inc.

Radiohead broke with its past practice of releasing its music in CD format and through a major record label when it released its seventh studio album online itself. The biggest wrinkle was the band's decision to let fans pay as much or as little as they wanted to download a copy.

The results of the study were drawn from data gathered from a few hundred people who are part of comScore's database of 2 million computer users worldwide. The firm, which has permission to monitor the computer users' online behavior, did not provide a margin of error for the study's results.

Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 29, about 1.2 million people visited the Web site the band set up for fans to download the album, comScore said Monday. The research firm did not say how many people in its study actually bought the album.

Among U.S. residents, about 40 percent who downloaded the album paid to do so. Their average payment was $8.05, the firm said.

Some 36 percent of the fans outside the U.S. who downloaded the album opted to pay; on average, those fans paid $4.64, according to the study.

Radiohead's U.S.-based publicist said Tuesday the band had no comment on the study.

The online release sent shock waves through the recording industry, with some hailing it as a shrewd move at a time of declining CD sales industrywide and others writing it off as a publicity stunt that amounted to the band giving away its music.

The band, which also offered fans the option of buying a lavish box set for about $82, plans to release the album in CD format some time next year.

This has been fully discussed in the far-superior General Discussion forum. It was kept out of the Non-Prince Music forum, because everyone knows there is no such thing as "Non-Prince" music.

http://prince.org/msg/100/251313

RodeoSchro said:

Well it doesn't belong in the "people with nothing better to do" general discussion forum either.....

Does that show its mostly the yanks that are the tight wads?

SquirrelMeat said:

Methinks it shows that, if artists leave it strictly up to their fans to determine what would be a fair economic exchange for an example of their craft, those artists stand a good chance of getting fucked over most of the time.

We see artists from our perspective. Shit like this says something to them about us.

WHY WAS MY SUPERIOR THREAD DELETED?

http://prince.org/msg/100/251313

RodeoSchro said:

OK, it allegedly wasn't deleted. The mods are supposedly taking out some flames or something like that.

I'm cool, just don't touch my jokes. NOBODY touches my jokes.

RODEOSCHRO TRANSLATOR: "Jokes" = "Penis".

Still no thread reinstatement. Hmmmm....

I'm beginning to certainly believe that this whole Prince/Org/Housequake/Tatto picture fiasco is nothing more than a diversion, meant to keep you from realizing that the REAL TRUTH has been deleted.

It used to be here: http://prince.org/msg/100/251313

CJBabyDaddy said:

this was a fucking stupid idea in the first place. in a capitalist, individualist society, if you give people the choice of taking something of value for free or paying something in exchange for it, most are going to do the former. if you give something the price tag of zero, people are going to want to pay zero for it. its how we are conditioned to behave. if they had just charged $10 or something for it they probably wouldn't have sold that much less copies anyway.

the idiotic stuff with the ludicrously overpriced "discbox" and "bonus disc" just complicated things further. radiohead had a really good chance to make a genuine difference with their distribution of this album and they, for the most part, made a complete arse of it

i paid $7 for it

but it isn't the greatest i have heard by them

it is worth more like $4