Radiohead give it away for free and make a million

I was delighted to hear today that a month after the release of their new album In Rainbows online it has been downloaded more than a million times.

Radiohead made history when they decided to make their album available for download and give people the option to pay whatever they wanted.

In the first month 62% of the people who downloaded it chose to pay nothing. Of the 38% who paid for it the majority paid less than $4 while only 4% paid more than $12.

Do you think that sounds bad? That ‘only’ 38% of people paid for it. Well maybe ‘only’ 38% of people paid for it but at a minimum of $4 each and with over a million downloads Radiohead have made well over a million dollars from the release of their new album. This is much more than the cut they would have gotten from the sale of similar quantities of their album if they had released it through the more usual methods such as cd.

I am a huge fan of free downloads of music and I think that Radioheads initiative should be an example to other big bands: give your fans something for nothing, make a fortune from it and screw the record companies!