Radiohead semi-reveals In Rainbows statistics
Radiohead Radiohead Radiohead. Since last year’s release of In Rainbows, Thom Yorke and the boys appearance in the news has been plentiful to say the least. After turning the industry on its heels, the group allowed fans to remix one of their songs, asked fans to create a video for “Reckoner”, embarked on an extensive world tour, again allowed for a remix, and lead an artist coalition, oh and Thom worked with Bjork on that single. Just thinking about it makes our hearts hurt and fingers cringe. But no time for crying, especially when there’s more Radiohead news to discuss.
If you’ll recall, the English crew released its album In Rainbows on its website as a “Pay what you want” download on October 10th of last year, an experiment which only now, a full year later, is being officially reviewed for its success.
At the “You Are in Control” conference in Iceland today, extensive details will be revealed about the album’s 
success, more general descriptions of which have been floating around the net. Music Ally reports that very generally speaking, the album was a huge success all in all, selling three million copies, 100,000 of which were in the $80 disc box format. Additionally, the band made more profit before the album’s physical release than was made off of 2004’s Hail to the Theif altogether. It was mentioned that more fans downloaded the album for free by illegal means, which is expected for any album, but still, the numbers don’t lie. This ‘experiment’ was a success.
Jane Dyball, head of business affairs at Warner Chappell, the publishing company who oversaw this unique release process, will not yet reveal the average price that fans chose to pay for the download. Additionally she elaborated that the band and publishers were monitoring the average price daily, and that if the average price were too sink to low, the group would remove the download and push to a physical release.
I know, its patchy info. Hopefully more in depth statistics will surface in the months to come. Most of us were aware that this release process was successful, and a few of these numbers clarify, but its not really new news, but knowing Radiohead, they’ll keep the news coming. It’s good to hear that album releases can still make money in this day and age. Let’s hope they do it the same way with that ‘new album.’
Leave a Reply