Did The Radiohead Experiment Work? See The Numbers

PaidContent.org:

The first concrete analysis of Radiohead's innovative pay-what-you-like plan for latest album In Rainbows shows thirty-eight percent of those who downloaded the title indeed chose to pay something, while 62 percent kept their change in their pocket. ComScore (NSDQ: SCOR) data (via release) shows 1.2 million people visited the site in the first 29 days of October (it was launched at the start of the month).

The average price paid was $6 on a globalized basis but Americans were more generous, coughing up $8.05 - factor in the freeloaders, however, and it's more like an average $2.26 on a worldwide basis and $3.23 from Americans. The most common amount offered was below $4, but 12 percent were willing to pay between $8 and $12, around the typical cost of an album from iTunes. More at our sister site paidContent.co.uk.

Read the whole story: PaidContent.org

Comments

[mcearlgrey]

Terrible record. I downloaded it from a torrent site, listened once and promptly deleted it. It's a boring retread of their last couple of records, which also weren't very good.

[EspressoAtNoon]

Radiohead needs to get a proper site developer to make their shopping cart work correctly.

None of the images appear. You have to guess which buttons to push. I'm sure many people didn't want to turn over their credit card to such a primitive and seemingly insecure shopping cart. They probably would have gotten a lot more otherwise.

[ChrisR]

All it proves is that if you leave it up to human nature, the majority will steal from you. Too bad, huh?

[Fletch17C]

I'm not into Radiohead's music, but I do believe all artists should be compensated for their music. If you can afford a computer and Internet access, you can afford to pay for the music you download. Radiohead was being generous. I sure their real fans were the ones who shelled out a few bucks. Perhaps the band was hoping to generate more fans by offering people a gift. I'm still not sure it was a good thing for the music business in general. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run.

[Quaoar]

Considering the album sucked, Radiohead made out well.

[grahamhgreen]

I think the average artist of there caliber would earn 1 to 2 dollars per CD?

Based on that, the release was highly successful, both monetarily and in the number of listeners.