I wrote about the “latest Radiohead release _In Rainbows_”:http://www.end-on-end.com/txp/2007/10/02/radiohead-sticks-it-to-the-man the other day and how they dropped their label to sell the album directly to fans at what ever price they chose to pay. Great experiment, right? Who needs a label, when you are as huge as Radiohead?
Well, today I ran across an article on “Rock Sellout”:http://rocksellout.com/2007/10/12/gigwise-in-rainbows-has-sold-over-12-million/ that claims 1.2 million copes of In Rainbows has been sold – in the first week. Crazy, huh? Even if the average price paid was £1, the band would rake in approximately $2.4 million US dollars. I bet they never got that kind of cut off their older records!
From the article:
According to a poll at The Times Daily, 1/3 of buyers chose to pay nothing, but most chose a price around 4 pounds. 67 of the 3000 polled actually chose to pay 10 pounds or more. If those figures are representative of the general music-buying public, then Radiohead could stand to make nearly $10 million on the album. And since they chose to market it directly – sans label – the majority of that cash goes directly to the band. Not too shabby.
Wow. I wonder how many other bands are lining up to go this route? Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Jamiroquai and Madonna have all made major moves recently (since Radiohead’s announcement, I believe) to move away from records labels, so is this the death knell for the major record labels? I hope so.
Related posts:
- Radiohead sticks it to the man…
- My Top Albums from 2007
- Touch and Go
- My Top 20 Albums of 2005
- My Desert Island Discs
This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.