Date: Saturday, October 13, 2007

Radiohead Unleash Potential of Digital Downloads

British rock band Radiohead recently made the bold decision to release their new album, In Rainbows, as a digital download. However, rather than offer their new opus to fans on iTunes for the standard rate, the band chose to let fans decide how much to pay for their music. As you can imagine, a number of cheeky fans chose to get the album for free, but in a surprising move, many decided to pay a more realistic amount. “As you might imagine, offers ranged from nothing to more than you might pay for a CD in the shops,” said a Radiohead spokesperson.

Letting fans do this is a doubly clever move for Radiohead, who are currently without a record label. Firstly, asking fans to put a price on their album has allowed them to conduct an interesting social experiment into the value of music and secondly, they have managed to combat Internet piracy by effectively pre-empting the pirates and leaking their own album.

Of course, Radiohead’s decision to do this has not been without controversy. Many criticised the band for rocking the future of the music industry, which has been threatened by digital downloads since the launch of Napster, a file-sharing website, in 2001. However, in releasing their album online, Radiohead have actually give record company bosses a much-needed wake up call. The band have effectively shown them the potential of the Internet and gently told them to adapt or face further major financial losses. Indeed, in the 12 months prior to March 2007, EMI lost a reported £100million and other major record companies are thought to have suffered similar losses.

The Internet doesn’t always spell disaster for the record industry. Some of the most successful artists of the last 5 years, including Arctic Monkeys, Kate Nash and Lily Allen, thrived after promoting themselves via email and social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace. The Internet has as much potential again for producing wonderful artists and selling plenty of records, the music industry just needs to find how to do it.

In choosing to use the Internet to promote their music so innovatively, Radiohead have proved to be an inspiration. More bands will undoubtedly follow their example and continue pushing boundaries to show that the Internet has limitless potential for both musicians and the music industry in general.

Source:

Guardian