These clothes paid for by ethical suckers
When Radiohead announced over a year ago that it would be releasing its seventh album, In Rainbows, exclusively online without the aid of a record label, it caused quite the uproar. Some hailed it as a sea change in the official distribution of albums. Others claimed it showed that record labels weren’t necessary and that artists, provided they were successful enough, could completely forgo them. And still others decried it as a gimmick, specifically pointing out perhaps the most unique feature of the plan: allowing fans to pay whatever they wanted for the album, including nothing at all.
After the album was released, reports began to trickle in about sales figures and revenue generated. By all accounts, the experiment was a success. I remember hearing some people estimate the band made millions off a few million downloads, plus the boxed set and physical CD which came out earlier this year. And none of that money, mind you, was going back to a record label (which often takes the vast majority of profits on album sales).
Today, however, more than a year after the experiment began, the official stats on In Rainbows have been released. Here they are, from Music Ally:
• After being made available for free for 3 months the album was no.1 in the UK and in the US
• 1st Radiohead album on iTunes – no.1 album selling 30,000 units in the US in the first week
• The physical CD has sold 1.75 million to date and is still top 200 UK & US
• They sold 100k boxsets via W.A.S.T.E.
Two notable stats about the release are not listed above. The first is that the during the time that the album was only available on Radiohead’s website (for free, if one chose not to pay), it generated more revenue in three months than the band’s 2003 album, Hail to the Thief, did since it had been released. That’s even more staggering when you consider the second notable piece of information: the majority of people who got the album did so for free, whether they paid nothing to download it from Radiohead, or they downloaded it off a BitTorrent tracker.
So really, it’s like this: Radiohead made a killing off this album, no doubt about it. The number of copies sold, including the more expensive boxed set (of which they sold 100,000 copies), led to even higher profits than usual, if only because Capitol Records wasn’t eating up a massive chunk of the album sale profits. But before aspiring artists get too excited about this change in distribution, sit back and think on what these figures say.
For one thing, Radiohead is a huge band that could afford to take a risk like this. They routinely sell out venues within five minutes of tickets going on sale and are considered by many to be the best band in the world. People were going to get this album no matter what – even if the distribution method involved having to shovel shit for a week to get a copy, a staggering number of people would have done it just to get their hands on this album.
That’s not the case for a smaller band just starting out. If you and your buddy decide to put an album on your website and offer a similar system, chances are you’re not going to get much money. Maybe your parents and friends will throw you a bone, but people aren’t going to give you money, most of the time, unless they already know who you are and want to you succeed. These people, call them diehard fans if you want, are the ones who likely paid money to download In Rainbows. They’re the people who genuinely like the band enough to throw them some money even when they know they can get the material for free. My point being, this group of people is much larger for Radiohead than it is for a small band just starting out. For Radiohead, the people who will pay no matter what might number in the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. For a band doing a tour up the west coast of the United States in a van, it might be a few hundred people (if that) who come to every show in a small venue. People are much more likely today to experience a new band by downloading their music for free than by purchasing anything from them.
In short, it’s an exciting development, but in order to make a living as a musician, artists need to be making money. For many, it’s not about money and success, but you won’t find many musicians who wouldn’t love to at least quit their day job and focus on music without having to worry about money as much. This sort of business model is intriguing, but it’s only really viable for a band with a built-in fanbase simply because the built-in fanbase, depending on how rabid it is, is almost guaranteed to spend some amount of money.
In the end, though, Music Ally makes a point about In Rainbows that I had been thinking for a while.
In fact, if anything, the only trouble with the whole thing was that it was just arguably too successful. The whole ‘pay what you like’ experiment became the story rather than the music itself. And that’s not so Radiohead. The band and Thom Yorke initially found themselves answering questions about why they chose to do what they did rather than being asked about the music itself.
This was on display in an issue of Entertainment Weekly this past summer, in which the magazine compiled the “Top 1000 of everything” over the past 25 years (it was as ridiculous as it sounds). The entire thing seemed to lean toward things produced since 2000, but one of the more shocking thing was that the magazine listed In Rainbows as the 10th best album of the past 25 years (OK Computer was all the way back at 62), mostly on the strength of its innovative distribution system. Like it or not, that’s how the album will be remembered – and it’s a shame, because I thought it was a pretty great record.
One year later, Radiohead’s gambit has paved the way for artists like Nine Inch Nails and Saul Williams to release albums exclusively online without record labels (with NIN’s album actually being offered for free, period). I’d expect more bands to try it in the future (bands with a huge cult following like Tool would be a prime beneficiary), but don’t kid yourself into thinking that “I Kissed A Girl” would have become the number one song in America without a record label.
Exclusive: Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” pot of gold [Music Ally]
