Pay what you want (and screw the music business)
Interesting piece on Radiohead by Jon Pareles in today's New York Times about the death of the music industry. So, as everybody knows, Radiohead decided to let the fans choose how much to pay for their new album "In Rainbows".
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after Radiohead's pay-what-you-want announcement for "In Rainbows," the story has moved from stunt to case study. Silicon Alley Insider counted 1.3 million downloads by mid-October while conceding Big Music wasn't dead yet, and a November comScore study found only two in five U.S. downloaders paid anything at all, averaging $6 per album — figures the band itself called totally inaccurate.
Into that fog of competing numbers steps Jon Pareles of the New York Times, using the experiment to argue the music industry's death in print. The debate now hinges on data nobody outside the band can verify: Freedom to Tinker argued the low average price might still mean higher profit than a label deal, which reframes even the freeloaders as margin rather than loss.
First-order effects
- The band's refusal to release its own sales figures leaves comScore's panel-based estimate — 2 in 5 paying, $6 average — as the de facto public record, and Radiohead's flat rejection of those numbers makes third-party measurement the story's battleground.
Second-order effects
- Other artists watching this now see that going direct means owning both revenue and data; labels lose their informational advantage when an act can route distribution itself and dispute outside estimates at will.
Third-order effects
- If name-your-price spreads beyond one established act, the industry's structural question shifts from 'what is an album worth?' to 'who measures sales?' — with research firms like comScore gaining outsized power precisely because artists withhold first-party numbers.
The trend: Recorded music is moving toward artist-controlled digital distribution, where price-setting and sales-data ownership shift from labels to bands and third-party estimators fill the credibility gap.