MUMBAI: This one comes as a sure shocker for the music industry worldwide – according to online media measurement company Big Champaign, British band Radiohead’s marketing gimmick to give away songs of their last album ‘In Rainbows’ with ‘a pay what you want to pay’ strategy has turned out to be a successful idea. Eric Garland, CEO, Big Champaign, revealed that giving away stuff for free is actually a good concept.
International band Radiohead is the first ever band which has threatened the usual business model of the record labels which are often labelled as exploiting musicians. Interestingly, the report found that releasing the album as a potentially free digital download obviously didn’t cut piracy and giving tracks away as DRM-free audio (Digital Rights Management) files seemed to in fact increase how much it was being pirated with 400,000 copies of the album being torrented on the release day. This figure went up to 2.3 million just three weeks later.
The report pronounces that album piracy is apparently proportional to the popularity of the band, and record companies, in spite of slapping awful DRM’s don’t have any impact. Even though Radiohead did not say about the money it made out of letting users set their own price to buy (or have for free).The sales hint that it did make good business.
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However, Thom Yorke, vocalist of the band hinted that it would be the first and last time the band will release their songs in such a way.
Though the physical CD of ‘In Rainbows’ managed to top the charts even a few months after the download release, Radiohead has now decided to sign a mega-bucks deal with a record label in a usually followed business model for their future albums.
