Radiohead Sales Figures: Only 38% Paid
comScore has released figures detailing the Radiohead choose-your-own-price experiment that was featured on practically every blog in the world recently.
62% of customers paid
And this, dear reader, means that a whopping 38% of customers didn’t. The question is: is 62% a large or small number in this experiment? That depends: by expectation, I think 62% is very small and I would’ve expected something more like 80-90%.
Of course, the album has been downloaded hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times by peer-to-peer, so the accurate figure of total distribution is probably much closer to my earlier prediction.
By expectation that number might be small, but is it really? Hell no. You don’t expect to walk into a bookstore and walk out again with a book without paying. You don’t expect to hire a lawyer for free. And it just so happens that musicians are serious professionals with a job to do and families to feed. The musician’s job is no less important than the lawyer’s job in society.
So why the #%*! are we getting shortchanged?
Many of us provide free songs for download these days, and yet our so-called fans and admirers think nothing about taking for free those things that we do ask something in return for.
The level of respect for musicians between the classical period and today has fallen to a dramatic low. This is thanks to the music industry’s strategy to perpetrate such an image of us upon the public; why? So they could get away with the ridiculous “payments” that they award musicians today (even with a hit record, most musicians are still in debt when working with the current industry).
But it backfired.
It was a plan that should have backfired, too, and it did; the music industry has been having a nervous breakdown for the last few years over piracy figures. Only, it didn’t just backfire on the perpetrators - it backfired on us.
Yup, we’re all in the same camp on this one. The public no longer respects the duty and role musicians and other artists fulfill in society. They don’t see the need to pay us for our work, just like the industry didn’t when it started ripping us off decades ago.
And that is why out of all Radiohead’s fans, only 38% didn’t steal from the band, and just because they offered the choice doesn’t make it right.
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Tags: radiohead, download, music, digital music
November 13th, 2007 at 3:53 am
[...] the major label artists are leaving the record companies as soon as they get the chance, and I think that soon enough those independent artists will be the [...]
November 25th, 2007 at 9:32 am
[...] stumbled onto this blog and read the Radiohead promotion summary post here: The public no longer respects the duty and role musicians and other artists fulfill in society. [...]
November 27th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
38% response for free international promotion is pretty good. Probably not very repeateable, as its more of a one-shot gimmick that has a limited shelf-life before the media stop picking up on it.
It occurs to me we should ask: What do you do for an encore? (i.e. when the next album is ready to go)
When you’ve got a great fanbase it’s easy. When you’ve worked with the traditional labels and studios (the big 6 soon to be 5) it’s an easier road as you’re already in their distribution network and usig that have reached a wider audience.
It’s building an audience from scratch that is the problem we have to resolve. And that model doesn’t appear to be there yet. There have been a few exceptional stories that have lent hope and inspired considerable creative marketing effort. But these are exceptions not the rule. One still has to pull a stunt to get larger attention and hit the radar of the fans.