Maybe “pay what you want” isn’t such a good idea?
Hot off the news that Girl Talk will “pull” a Radiohead in offering a “pay what you want” album, it turns out that the action may have not been as successful as we were initially led to be.
According to the BBC and BBC 6 Music, of the people who have acquired In Rainbows, 60-70% of them who downloaded the record stole it anyway, even though it was available for free,” meaning they obtained it from a place other than Radiohead’s official website. The news agency went on to note that an internet monitoring company “found only 38% of downloaders willingly paid, while the others who accessed Radiohead’s website gave nothing.”
While if you think about it, these numbers shouldn’t come as much as a surprise, it does offer a pretty eye opening look at the current state of music. While In Rainbows did chart in at #1 on both the U.S. and U.K. charts, exhibiting that if you’re a big enough name, people will still buy your material, regardless of the outlet, these numbers have to be fairly disappointing for smaller names and musicians. “Free” is the most appealing word for any human being, and when given the opportunity of paying nothing for music, whether legal or illegal, more times than not, people are going to take it. It
Of course, all this is very important, considering the future of the music industry and music distribution as well. The aforementioned statistics accompany an article detailing the release plan of U2’s upcoming, currently untitled album, due to hit music shelves sometime in the fall. Bono and company, who are said to be exploring new techonology that will “make the release of the new record as interesting as possible,” might provide the next glimpse on the future of album releases, but thanks to these numbers, it doesn’t look like the “pay what you want” theory will be part of that.
Im the founder of new pay-what-you-want music service called Aralie.com, and were living proof that the model works. We found that 80% of people are willing to pay more then retail for music because they feel like they have a much better connection with the artist because they know 85% of all sales go directly to the musician and not the label.
I also noticed you published a piece about the whole thing, which I read after posting the above opinion…
Ryan,
I was reacting based off the new piece, which was published before Girl Talk released his album. By the looks of it, as you point out, Feed the Animals can easily be considered a success.
But regardless of the release type, people are always going to download/get the album for free. As the data points out in the article, even when Radiohead released In Rainbows as a “pay what you want”, people still downloaded it off-site. So while the effort is noble, realistically, it didn’t change much.
Of course, this is based off of just a small sample size so we don’t know for sure.
Alex- Why would you say this isn’t a good idea? Based on Girl Talk’s early and apparently modest, but good results, why would this be a bad idea? I tend to disagree…but before I do, I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on the topic. Care you expand a bit?
Thanks and keep up the good word.
I just think that they should get some profit out of what they do for a living.
I think the illegal downloading argument goes out the window when we consider someone like Girl Talk who has not cleared any of his hundreds of samples and is on Illegal Art. Music itself should be free. Radiohead provided the music for free themselves. They don’t have a problem with it being downloaded free, why do you?
I don’t like illegal downloadng i completely disagree with it and you people tht just took the album for free should really be ashamed, it was a good jesture on radioheads part with the pay what u want deal it may hav been low on cost and they did still make heaps of of it but still these people deserve some payment for the’re efforts.
I think the reason a lot of people ended up downloading from other osurces is that not only was the In Ranbows website god awful slow, but Radiohead also asked for lots of personal information that they did not need (cell phone number?) from you in order to download the album. And, considering the extremely minimal costs for producing this album and the fact that they keep 100% of profit, they still ran away with a shit ton of money out of this whole ordeal.
Jun 16th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
[...] Talk looks to be gearing up for the release of his upcoming, “pay what you want”, album, Feed the Animals, expected to be released any day [...]