Radiohead In Rainbows- Results seem positive
So Radiohead has claimed they won’t release results on the sales figures for In Rainbows, I’m not sure why not really but whatever, there are some pretty good guesses being floated and it sure looks good. Here is a quote from the Seminal-
According to a source close to the band, In Rainbows has “sold” approximately 1.2 million copies as of October 12th. In comparison, that’s more albums sold in the first week than Radioheads’ last three releases combined. According to an Internet poll of 3,000 people, the average price paid for In Rainbows was $8. If these numbers are accurate, Radiohead has made close to $10 million in one week on this album alone. Read More…
So…they potentially made 6-10 million from sales! That sure sounds good, of course I have no idea how much they make from their label, but I’ll take those figures to the bank anyday. There have been a lot of estimates about the album being downloaded concurrently on Bittorrent, and many have speculated on the reasons for this. My personal experience was that the user experience on the official Radiohead site was HORRIBLE, and I’ll bet they could have doubled their sales if they had evaluated that further. The site was hit hard and was slow as slow can be, and once I found the actual link to pay and figured out what to do the form kept resetting to a value of 0 every time i tried to enter a number (I was going to pay…really, I don’t even like Radiohead much, I just love that they are doing this) and would not let me proceed…I ended up getting the album from a friend who was able to get through to the site, I liked it, and have since been back to fork over some dough. The whole conversion from pounds to dollars thing was poorly handled as well, it’s really not a stretch for that to all be fully automated. I’d call this experiment a success, and say, there were things to be learned, hopefully they will address the UI a bit and make sure to have a scalable solution for the bandwidth to handle the interest next time.
Radiohead- Official Website (considerably faster now)
October 20th, 2007 at 9:45 am
It’s a GREAT albumn, I really love 15 step and Reckoner. It’s a bummer that the website experience sucked so bad but hopefully lessons will be learned from this “experiment” and this trend will continue. Freedom to Tinker has a great post about this release and competition from p2p.
October 20th, 2007 at 10:04 am
That is an interesting article, although I might disagree somewhat with the claim that it is just ease of use in general. Itunes is just as easy to use as any p2p software (minus the DRM of course which is pretty easily removed). In this instance it was very obviously a problem, but I also think .99 a song might be too costly for a lot of people.
I think my favorite track currently is “All I Need”, mostly for the simple bass line, the percussion in “Reckoner” is really cool.