Interesting article:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0...07658.html
Music industry ‘should embrace illegal websites’

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York

Published: August 3 2008 17:39 | Last updated: August 3 2008 17:39

The music industry should embrace illegal file-sharing websites, according to a study of Radiohead’s last album release that found huge numbers of people downloaded it illegally even though the band allowed fans to pay little or nothing for it.

“Rights-holders should be aware that these non-traditional venues are stubbornly entrenched, incredibly popular and will never go away,” said Eric Garland, co-author of the study, which concluded there was strong brand loyalty to controversial “torrent” and peer-to-peer services.

Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-want basis last October generated enormous traffic to the band’s own website and intense speculation about how much fans had paid.

He urged record companies to study the outcome and accept that file-sharing sites were here to stay. “It’s time to stop swimming against the tide of what people want,” he said.

The study by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, which represents music rights holders, and Big Champagne, an online media measurement company, found that legal downloads of In Rainbows were far exceeded by illegal torrent downloads of the album.

Almost 400,000 illegal torrent downloads were made on the first day and 2.3m in the 25 days following the album’s release, compared with a full-week’s peak of just 158,000 for the next most popular album of the period.

“The expectation among rights-holders is that, in order to create a success story, you must reduce the rate of piracy – we’ve found that is not the case,” said Mr Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, who highlighted the benefits that Radiohead received from the album’s popularity, including strong ticket sales for its concerts this year.

The findings could add impetus to rights-holders’ efforts to license digital services that are at present beyond their reach, following the pattern of the MCPS-PRS Alliance’s recent move to license YouTube, the Google-owned online video-sharing site.

“Developing new ways and finding new places to get something as opposed to nothing” was important, said Will Page, MCPS-PRS chief economist and co-author of the report.

Those new places could be peer-to-peer sites or internet service providers, he added.

Record companies should ask themselves: “What are the costs and benefits of control versus the costs and benefits of scale?” said Mr Page.

He also challenged the assumption that no other band could achieve the same benefits, saying Radiohead’s experiment had reduced the marginal cost and risk for those following their lead.

He described the launch of In Rainbows as “stunt marketing at its best”.

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according to a study of Radiohead’s last album release that found huge numbers of people downloaded it illegally even though the band allowed fans to pay little or nothing for it.

thats a wake up call if i've ever heard one

CosmicDancer said:

not to mention a slap in the face to a band that asked for little and got even less for the work their fans supposedly love.

i'm against the notion of 19 bucks for a cd but i'm also against people expecting something for nothing. i would like to see how many of us are willing to go to work every morning, be productive, and walk away without expecting to get paid.

there's no legitimate justification for stealing something just because you can. it doesn't matter of you pay to see them live, or pay for the merch, or whatever. if you listen to the cd, if you want the cd in your collection, pay for it like you would anything else.

this is just another example of punishing the producer of value for the simple fact that you want what they produce.

Please, if you wanted to stop the major peer to peer sites you can, saying you cant is bullshit.
You will never stop people trading amongst themselves, but you can stop Pirate Bay type p2p "sites" if big biz and governments would get off their asses.
It will happen

BTW Radiohead learned enough to say they would not release their next album that way. lol

violetblues said:

where did they say this? u got a link.

Radiohead's legal and business model is flawed and am not surprised it failed miserably - hey at least it attempted to address the issue of file-sharing.

sassybritches said:

i agree but then i disagree. how are you going to coerce people into pruchasing legitimate copies of music when they are already entrenched in their own ways - many wont go from illegally downloading free albums to purchasing them. you won't also find many honest people willing to pay the real price. this is about trying to or attempting to change the mindset of the average consumer who already work on the basis that they can get something without paying for it and its brilliant to them.

How did Radiohead fail? I still dont understand how people think they failed, it was a no lose situation, and they won clearly. They gave the option of Price and even though it was a small % people did still pay, then when the album was released it has sold 400,000 to date in the USA alone. Not bad for an album that was Free to anyone.

they failed with me... they asked me to pay for a great album with complete shit quality 160kbps...

thanks for heads up on the quality thom.

Sdldawn said:

to be honest, i didn't pay for that download. i got it from their own site
on the day it was released and didn't pay for it since i knew that i would
(and i since did) buy the actual cd copy.

if they'd kept it a strictly download only album i would have payed for it
but just like with prince i don't really see the need to pay for a download
if i'm gonna buy their physical product a month later.

it'd be like buying 2 copies of the same album in the store. i never did it
before and i don't intend to start doing it now.

if something is only available online i'll pay for it but i'm not gonna be
dishing out cash if i'm gonna buy it in the store later on.

and people will say "but you get it early and it's in support of the group"
yeah well, there's enough people downloading it from a torrent who will not
buy the physical product at all.

the music bizz just need to rethink their strategy. either sell albums thru
your own website and ship them out for $6 a piece or sell them in stores at
a prince between $6 and $8. that might get me back to buying instead of the
download and only buy if it's really really really good attitude i have now.

sassybritches said:

but how many of us are paid their wages and then expect to be payed again
a few months later for the exact same work, simply because someone put an
index on it and slapped it into a folder?

I love "In Rainbows" and I love Radiohead, would have bought the physical CD, no prob, but i recieved my copy as a gift during pledge week at our local public radio station KCRW.

sassybritches said:

You are missing the point. There is nothing you or the industry can do. I detest these revolving door debates. It's not a black and white issue. I reccomend when this 13 part series on Piracy comes out, you watch this attentively.

The act of doing something just makes it worse kind of like the war on terrorism. Alot of bands support downloading on P2p. The ones that don't are usually RIAA motivated or paranoid of new technology. Either Adapt or Die...it's that simple. The more you talk about it the more you promote it.
The future is now. There is NO strangehold on the truth in this issue.

Technically you arent stealing their money if you weren't going to pay for it anyways. You only have so much money to buy music. Those that do it correctly are the victors those that do it incorrectly are the latter. The way I look at it is, if it it's out there I and millions of others are going to download these select artists. It's that simple and people have to deal with it. There will always be someone in the world excited to share something that may be illegal in copyright. But we have bigger problems in Piracy than audiophile who doesn't follow copyright rules. I have no problem with downloading whatsoever.


We can go around in circles,Sassybritches. But the truth is we all have copyrighted material on our harddrive whether it be graphics,text,sound files or video files. Anyone who says they don't are lying. I can check your cache in about 2 seconds and technically the users will have it on their hard drive.
Anyone who says they do not have copyrighted material on their computer is a hypocrite. Even the people at the RIAA/MPAA have copyrighted illegal material from the internet. So if we going to go by the letter of the law that makes everyone guilty for having copyrighted material in their browser cache

I support Rapidshare,megaupload,badongo,filedropper,shareit,sendit,isohunt,piratebay,

People bring awareness to new artists and the only way I would know about them is through these various avenues. That is a fact and people have to deal with the positives and negatives of any new technology.

There is one plus side to all of this for artists who are paranoid: Alot of these links and seeds die after a 5-6 month cycle.