Radiohead says, “Set your own price.” What to do?
As most of you have probably heard by now, Radiohead released their seventh studio album, In Rainbows, for DRM-free download today. The price? “Pay what you want”–an approach that is speculated to have something to do with preventing illegal downloading and album leaks, learning pricing demand and increasing distribution numbers.
A fellow Seattle blogger admitted to paying $9 for the album, and in a conversation I had with another Radiohead fan, he paid $13, but then said he’d pay $10 if he had to do it again because he was “a little taken aback at first.” I personally said, $15, but then settled on $10. After all, I’m not receiving cover art or a hard copy, right? Anybody else care to share the price they named?
Another version of In Rainbows–a deluxe boxed set that includes a double vinyl disc, book, eight bonus tracks and two CDs–will be out the first week of December. It costs 40 pounds (roughly $81) and also includes the DRM-free download that is available today. Radiohead says they are planning a traditional in-store release of the CD early in 2008 as well.
For those of you who’d like to hear before you buy, KEXP has been playing the album in its entirety today, and a track-by-track preview can be found here.
Fair warning to potential downloaders: There have been some complaints on the bit rate of the download, and the site seems to be currently somewhat inaccessible because of high traffic volumes.
Some of us tried our damnedest to pay Radiohead around $7 for the download–and couldn’t get the site to load the confirmation page. Instead of constantly reloading, and risking having my card charged multiple times, I went with free for simplicity’s sake.
I can get a lot of music from other legal download sites (emusic, for instance) for 25 cents a track, so that’s starting to feel like the standard price of an mp3 to me.
iTunes would charge $10 (10 songs at $1) and probably keep half of the margin with the distributing studio (or more?), so I paid $5. It’s a great deal for me, and artists still make as much. Only the middle man looses, which is fine for me. Philosophically, artists should still make some money, but intermediaries only get money when they bring value.
I registered at $0, not thinking that they would actually send it to me. They did. I plan on “buying” it again for $10 just to pay them.
Paying zero because you’re worried that your credit card will be overcharged or to check the legitimacy sound like pretty good reasons. I don’t understand people that literally would pay zero just because they’re cheap. I mean really, what’s $5 or $10 for a great album?! I do like that Radiohead eliminated the middleman. Sometimes I feel forced to purchase my music off iTunes because I own a Mac, and that’s how your music/iPod is set up. I’m interested to hear the end results of their “pay what you want” experiment…
£7
Having paid £2.50 for the album, because that’s more or less equivalent to emusic’s price, I’m still very tempted to shell out the £40 for the boxed set. I’m well aware that this is a very warped notion of value, what with the music being the most important part of the product, but interesting packaging is something Radiohead do particularly well….
Oh, also I think the load on the download site has got back down to levels it can handle. I gave up even trying to use the site on Wednesday, but this morning it was running nice and smoothly again.