- Friday, 10 July 2009
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There's one thing I can promise you about the space program. Your tax dollars will go further. - Wernher Von Braun
How much is Radiohead worth?
THE INQ has already reported on Radiohead's attempt to bring music marketing into the 21st Century by letting the punters pick their own price for their latest offering "In Rainbows".
This is, depending on whom you talk to, either a move of sublime genius which will revolutionise the way music is bought and sold, or a cynical attempt to generate publicity and sales for a band whose marketability has declined markedly in the years since "OK Computer".
Now, thanks to Record of the Day, a little known Internet based music publication, we have some idea of whether or not the model is actually working.
They received over 5000 responses to an online survey asking how much people actually paid for Tom Yorke and co's bits and bytes. The bottom line is that when they factored out those who may also be in
the market for the comically priced £40 slipcase version, the average price paid for "In Rainbows" was £3.88, with about a quarter of downloaders being freeloaders and paying nothing but the 45p handling fee.
For Radiohead at least, the gamble appears to have paid off. It's unlikely that this news has music industry executives reaching for the sleeping pills quite yet however. Those attempting to follow Radiohead's lead are unlikely to rake in the cash in the same way, since the novelty of the idea will have worn off, and there will be less motivation for punters wanting to reward pioneers attempting to offer a fairer model for music pricing.
Add to this the fact that as an established and successful band, Radiohead already has a lot of generated goodwill that has resulted in massive amounts of generated publicity at no cost to them.
They certainly aren't the first band to have tried the tip jar model of music sales, but they're probably the first to make serious money as a result.
The band are clearly doing this with at least the acceptance of Big Music. " In Rainbows" is being published by industry bigwigs Warner/Chapell, and there will still be a standard CD release. This perhaps goes some way to explaining why the MP3 files supplied are in low quality 160Kbps format, and therefore unsuitable for playing on a home stereo system. It's possible that this will have affected some people's buying decisions, although the download site doesn't exactly make this easy to find out. µ
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160kbps CBR LAME "unsuitable for a home stereo"?

Perhaps you should wait until the CD is available, at which point you can perform a blind listening test and then maybe prove how poor the quality is. 99% of people will not be able to.

Yawn.
When did 160kbps become "low quality" ? 128kbps can be great quality so long as the track isn't "normalized for clarity" (made much louder by shaving of all the peaks) .. another 32kbps only adds to the dynamic range... 

As long as the amp and EQ are allowed do their jobs, that's plenty of bandwidth for 2ch audio.
It all depends on your home stereo. I worked my a******* off during college in the restaurant industry and ended up purchasing a used Paradigm Home Theater setup worth about 8K (retail anyways) and a used headphone setup worth about 5K (retail, again). 

It is REALLY easy to hear the difference between low bit-rate mp3's and 320 kbps mp3's or CDs on my setups at home. It totally depends on what your definition of "home stereo" is. With cheap speakers purchased at the local electronic store or $500 "surround sound systems" that include a receiver, there's a good chance you won't hear the difference, but for the discerning listener it's like night and day. 

Here's some pics of my headphones from someone selling them at my favourite headphone website, www.head-fi.org

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=166921&highlight=w2002
3.88 pounds (that's like U$7.50?) is waaay more than what they would have made with regular CD sales. The studios keep all the money and the 'royalty' is usually measured in cents, which BTW don't start arriving until the 'down payment' (for the studio sessions) is fully paid. If they have a good contract (fought toe and nail with a good lawyer) they would get U$1 or max U$2 per CD (and those are only for well established stars). I sincerely hope that more artists follow their lead.
actually 320kbps is the first quality which you might not hear on computer - in home hi-fi it is easy to distinguish even difference between poor and good cd - not talking about mp3
Already commented on this before as did several others - If you opt to pay 0p then there is no handling fee as there is no charge.
I don't know what all the hoopla is about. The format or sound quality is irrelevant. This band sux. Sounds like Talking Heads on ritalin. Glad I didn't pay much.
The audio quality is irrelevant. The substance is not that good. Sounds like Talking Heads on ritalin.
The article quotes 5000 sales at an average of £3.88. That makes for not even £20k. Radiohead is a group of 5 members, so that makes less than £4000 per member.
It's enough to last a month or three, but it hardly makes for "serious money".
DLewis, are you talking about proper double blind tests or just you switching from compressed to uncompressed and saying "Ha ha, this is so much better" just because placebo effect is working its magic on you?

It's definitely possible to ABX high bitrate MP3s, even on lower quality equipment (I use Ultimate Ears UE-10 for what that matters :p) but stating 192kbps is crap reeks of so much ignorance it's not even funny.

Plus, stating that a Lame encoded 160kbps is not good enough to be listened to on home systems is pure misinformation. If you have $10.000 systems maybe... on the average readers' system it would do great.
Not 5000 sales. It's 5000 people who responded to a questionaire on a site no one's ever heard of. So actual sales are a lot highter. I'm sure I read somewhere that more than a million people downloaded.

£3.88 is more than an artist would get from a cd sale, plus they've still got the cd to come. They're raking it in!
by the time they pay VAT , taxes , someone to do the books.A manager , the bloke to do the webset , the bills . They are looking at hunger or a job at maccrap!
If you're listening on better gear (ie. what some older folks would refer to as 'Hi-Fi equipment') you can clearly hear the difference between CDs and MP3s. I personally can't listen to anything less than 320kbps for an extended period without getting a headache... not to mention how boring, flat and 2-dimensional the sound is. Don't expect typical gear found in big box stores to clearly reveal the sound quality differences, though.
I won't pay money for music unless it is FLAC. I want to hear the music how it was produced, not compensating with cheesy after effects so it sounds just OK.

ON a decent MP3 (actually OGG player) 128kb sounds like arse, no amount of post processing or EQ will help that.
Pascal, the 5000 figure is the number of people who filled in the survey saying how much they paid, not the number who bought the album.

I can't find it now but I think I read somewhere that they have had 700,000 preorders for the diskbox alone.
O hai Pascal Monett, it seems you read the article wrong. It was a survey of 5000 people, the actual sales in the first week was 1.2 million... that's a lot.