Radiohead - pay what you want

Radiohead have released their latest album, if that’s the right word any more, and made it available for download for free if you want it, payment at all being optional.
You want it free, it’s free. You want to pay ten quid, it’s ten quid. Whatever.

Pundits on the telly are talking about revolutions in the music industry and walking into shops and paying whatever they want for a CD. Free CD if they want it.

That’s not going to happen, it ignores the fact that a CD will only be in the shop because a whole lot of people have had to be paid in the first place for it to be there, the CD manufacturer, the printers, the distributors, not to forget the shops themselves, they have overheads too. Unless Radiohead are actually hell-bent on going out of business, this is an option that the public will never have.

Downloads, though, are a different matter. No hardware distribution medium, no vendors as such, but while servers and web sites will have to be maintained to make the downloads available, it’s still a far cheaper method of distribution than through a physical medium.

Radiohead will presumably want to be repeating the experience (making more music) and they’ll need funds for that. If they’re to get it from selling downloads, then they’ll need to make the fans aware of typical recording costs, living costs for the duration, etc. etc. The fans will have to factor that into the amount they want to reasonably pay for the music. OK, they could buy it for 40p, but if enough people do that then it’ll be the last Radiohead music download/album ever as they won’t have the funds to be making any more. So, while perhaps fans don’t want the band necessarily to have a Ferrari each to drive to the studios in, they don’t want them on the breadline either. What would be the costs of that? What might a reasonable amount to pay for the album actually be?

I don’t know, and I doubt most people would. If Radiohead or any band with a similar gambit are to make this succeed, then they’ll need to be educating the public about what they’ll be needing in terms of return in order to be able to carry on affording to give the fans what they want, the music.

So yes, you can buy the new download for a nominal sum or even get it for nothing, but now that you appreciate the likely consequences, is that really what you’d want?

Pay what you want, but first know what you want.

Crowley had it right.