Why give it away for free when people might actually want to pay for it. Price of the new Radiohead album will be exactly what you want to pay for it. I’m thinking of paying £0.10 per track which is a lot more compared to what any artist makes on any other type of, legal, download.
I will also be buying the special edition ‘Discbox’, which you do have to pay a fixed amount of monetary units. £40.
–kristian
ps. The ‘Discbox’ has two 12″ LP’s as well as tons of other good stuff. I think it’s time for me to buy a new record player. The old one broke when moving to my previous place about 15 months ago. If you have one you want give me, get in touch. Thanks.
Comments
7 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.In my opinion – this is what has to happen, its the future.
People are becoming more unlikely to pay the full price for a CD, when they can ‘source it’ from elsewhere. Personally I only buy CD’s if I know I’ll get something extra i.e if i get a booklet, bonus DVD, bonus songs or remixes ‘unavailable elsewhere’. Radiohead answers this by their discbox which not only gives you a special extra box, but also vinyls and pictures etc – its a bloody christmas present!
can other artists please follow their footsteps and give up on releasing their singles on USBsticks and other stupid formats.
It’ll be really interesting to see, if they’ll ever tell, how much people are willing to pay for the music. My guess is £1.30 on average per album. They’ll end up with making more money than when dealing through a label.
It’s a lot easier for an established band like Radiohead to do this and make it worth while. How would a smaller, new, band be able to do this if they didn’t get the coverage from main stream media? Setting up a pay per download service on your bands website is so easy these days that I’m surprised not that many are doing it. Or are they? I’d like to see examples.
I’m don’t know enough about the music industry and how things are for new bands but I can’t see MySpace revolutionizing the industry much further. After all, it really is just another place for the labels to find new music. Same way as they used to go and see gigs of new bands to see how fans react to it, they can now see it online. When MySpace – and the others – will pay off for the artist is when the artist realises not to use it as a place to find a label but to find customers.
It’s OK for Radiohead to go ahead with no label or Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails to ask fans to steal his music. But are the small ones taking any of this? Is it still the best thing ever to be signed to label?
In Finland a band called Ultrasport decided to give the customer the right to pay any amount from 1€ of their new album. And that was a real CD with booklet and stuff sold in a real record stores. And you know what was the average price that people was willing to pay? 3 euros. For the full length album. That is ridiculous. How do they think bands are making albums? How much is the finnish indie-pop band doing work for the album? It is different with Radiohead of course. Their are millionaires already. But I mean people are not ready to pay anything for the album that is purely made to fill the missing part in finnish pop music. Of course the band is making music because it is fun and you know there’s really no point to expect any money from album sales in Finland with that kind of indie pop. But there seems to be no hope to get things better when nobody really wants to pay anything from cd’s or songs. Personally I think the right price for the CD is from 12 to 15 euros. Respect the musician!!
kristian, you’re a cheap skate!
of course we’d all like to get everything for less, and hey if you can get it for ‘free’
then we’re tempted to. but honestly i think we’ve been spoilt by the abundance of methods to steal music. musicians need to get paid.
i say £7.50 (€15) for an album is fine.
1 album = 2 london pints
1 album = 1 bottle of wine
1 album = a takeaway meal
1 album
oh, my less than signs got eaten.
i meant:
one album less than my train journey to work
one album less than price of one ink cartridge for my A3 inkjet printer.
i’m getting the £40 box set of the radiohead album
Ultrasport can be found here, if you’re interested.
-Disclaimer on Ultrasport’s website
I guess that’s just the problem, it’s easier to steal than buy when it comes to digital music. Indie software developers have fought against this by making it really easy to buy their software. In most cases you can start using the software while PayPal transaction is waiting to complete.
maybe a great deal of the people who before would have been happy to pay full price for the albums are students etc who actually are happy to now steal it and have two pints at cat and mutton (or three and three quarters at any samuel smith)…?
but how are bands ever gonna be as big as radiohead or prince and practically give the music for free but expect to make shit loads by playing wembley or with special boxes or whatever if they cant make profit from selling people the rights to listen to their music?
i want the box but i don’t think i will use it for much more than listen to the sweet tunes featured…