We’ve just celebrated the one year anniversary of the experimental launch to Radiohead’s last album, In Rainbows. And perhaps even more exciting than the music on the band’s last album are the statistics associated with that release, to be presented next month at You Are In Control, a conference on music and media, according to an article that came out today from Pitchforkmedia.com.
For those not up on the doings of the world’s favorite indie-electro rock band: The fascinating detail surrounding the October 2007 release of In Rainbows was the fact that you could download it for a donation of your choosing for nearly two and half months on the band’s website. When the album was being produced, Radiohead had just gotten out from under its record contract. Rather than re-sign with another label, they went their own way. Hence the hijinks: In Rainbows was intentionally marketed first as a download for a donation. (You could also fork over about $80 for a delicious discbox set that included oodles of In Rainbows ephemera.) At the end of December 2007, the free download offer was taken down off the Radiohead site, and a retail compact disc was released.
So about that big worry, the irrascible fear that Radiohead was crazy and would make peanuts for their effort?
According to the Pitchfork article: the band sold 100,000 copies of the discbox, and 1.75 million copies of the compact disc. As Paul Thompson says: Not bad for something you could get for free. In releasing In Rainbows this way, (and I’m certainly not the first to say this) the band bucked traditional marketing and made something really magical–and profitable–happen. While the record industry was pressing charges against college students for illegal downloads, Radiohead made history–not by fighting against a changing market, but by shaping a changing market. This is a band instructing the industry how to be profitable–not the other way around. From the article:
“Music Ally (a marketing agency reporting for Radiohead) notes that the last several Radiohead releases sold in the hundreds of thousands, not millions, so the buzz-building nature of the band’s release plan certainly lit a fire under consumers. To that end, their report offers that “the fact that Radiohead had made more money before In Rainbows was physically released than they made in total on Hail to the Thief (the prior album) is surely evidence enough that the initiative was a tremendous success.”
Whoa–Radiohead made money because the album was free?
I know that we are still far from the the age where readers seeking books electronically outnumber those who want them in paper, but I still think there’s a way to see a parallel here between the music and book industries. Specifically, between corporate publishing and corporate music–or rather, corporate music just as digital music was on the rise. Let’s say corporate music just before the advent of the ipod.
The In Rainbows experiment worked because it was the right band in the right cultural moment. Couldn’t a writer find him or herself in the right cultural moment, too? Better yet, a writer able to anticipate a future cultural moment? A writer with the power to shape a changing publishing market? (Or: a publishing market in need of a change?)
So here is what I’ve spent the afternoon imagining: J.D. Salinger has a change of heart and comes out with a new novel, but releases it on a website he has created. The book is downloadable as a searchable .pdf for a month in advance of it’s hardcover release date. There’s a feature that let’s you bookmark in the last sentence you read and jump back to it between taking your dog for a walk. The novel is downloaded and e-mailed around like crazy. Broke college kids give it to their parents for the holidays. Suddenly, book news makes the front page of the newspaper. Kindle sales go through the roof, and within three months, Apple, Microsoft, and Google all develop their own e-readers. The quality of e-readers goes through the roof. By this time, Salinger has made a small fortune from hardback sales, without having to advertise–enough that he pays the entire world to not bother him ever again. People use their check from Salinger to buy the next generation of e-reader. Suddenly, there’s a market for downloadable novels and hardbacks. Publishing is reinvigorated; there’s money to take chances again. The Dow recovers. Libraries check out e-readers loaded with entire sections–automotive repair manuals for the entire history of cars, every yearbook, ever. People fall in love at voluminous rates.
Please, Mr. Salinger?