Is “free” too much to pay for online music? Last month, the critically acclaimed group of Internet entrepreneurs known as Radiohead released its latest album, In Rainbows, in digital format and invited fans to download it from its website. The price? The completion of a registration form, plus whatever you feel like paying. Five dollars? Great! Zero? That’s fine, too.
Last week, the Internet measurement firm ComScore released its analysis of the experiment. It estimates that 62 percent of the people who downloaded In Rainbows in the month of October chose not to pay, 17 percent forked over at least a penny but no more than $4, and the remaining 21 percent paid between $4.01 and $20. Factoring in the freeloaders, ComScore concluded that Radiohead’s fans paid an average price of $2.21 for the hotly anticipated album.
Radiohead says ComScore, which based its estimates on a sample of approximately 1,000 users who visited Radiohead’s site, doesn’t know what it’s talking about. ComScore’s estimates are “purely speculative” and “wholly inaccurate,” the band insists, and it’s “impossible for outside organizations to have accurate figures on sales.”
So what are the real numbers? Alas, Radiohead hasn’t released any lyrics for that sad song yet. What it’s also failed to mention is that it’s not just outside organizations who can’t possibly know how many people have downloaded In Rainbows and how much they’ve paid for it—Radiohead doesn’t know either.
That’s because the band’s official website is not the only place to get the album, for free or otherwise. According to Forbes and another Internet measurement company, BigChampagne, In Rainbows appeared on file-sharing sites like TorrentSpy and the Pirate Bay the day Radiohead posted it to its own site, and at least 500,000 people downloaded it from unofficial sources during the first four days of its release. By now, it’s safe to say that more than a million music lovers have decided that making up a fake name and address is too steep a price to pay for online albums—someone break out the virtual champagne and the virtual platinum-record plaque!
Of course, Radiohead is still getting paid better than the typical lab rat. Because the band doesn’t have to share any of the money it collects with record labels, traditional retailers or online retailers, it may ultimately clear enough from this project to allow its five members and its technical support team to live the sort of profligate rock-star lifestyle enjoyed by really good mid-level accountants.
Ultimately, however, the only thing the supposedly forward-thinking members of Radiohead really proved is that they’re living in the past. The idea that the Internet cuts out record-industry middlemen and closes the loop between artist and fan died eight years ago, when Shawn Fanning unleashed Napster on the world. This experiment simply throws another few tons of dirt on the already well-buried coffin. A statement album, an album that was supposed to prove that a future for artist-to-fan commerce really exists, released by a well-known band that has built up a loyal fan base through 15 years of traditional music-industry promotion, can’t even give away its music for free without losing substantial market share to the file-sharing networks? Even the mournful falsetto of Thom Yorke in despondent-beagle mode would be hard-pressed to convey the sadness of that fact.
The people who downloaded In Rainbows from sites like TorrentSpy and the Pirate Bay did so for numerous reasons, no doubt. Perhaps they were worried that Yorke and his bandmates might start sending them penis-enlargement spam. Perhaps they ran into problems while trying to download the album from the official site, which experienced technical issues as it tried to survive the initial stampede for the album. Perhaps they simply felt it would be easier to get In Rainbows from one of the sites where they get all their other free music.
Unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse. Because imagine what happens when 10, or a hundred, or a thousand other bands of Radiohead’s stature duplicate its experiment. Would rock ’n’ roll have grown into a billion-dollar industry if 1950s teenagers had to buy (or shoplift) their Elvis singles in one store, their Little Richard singles in another, their Chuck Berry singles in a third? The more bands that mimic Radiohead’s efforts to eliminate the middleman, the more attractive piracy becomes. Legitimate middlemen start looking rather handsome, too—at least from the perspective of fans who want fast, flexible, convenient access to a wide range of music. To them, the Radioheads of the world are just the session players; iTunes is the only brand that matters.