The Music Industry will most likely spring on the bandwagon and announce that even if they would offer the music for free it would be pirated. To an extent it would surely. But this case is different. Some technical problems during the first days made it impossible for many users to download the music at all.

I know some who would have liked to listen to the music before purchasing it which is not possible at the Radiohead website. Many turned to Bittorrent to grab the In Rainbows album from there because of the load on the Radiohead website.

Several users went through the registration process at the In Rainbows website only to find out that the download would fail. The problem here was that it was not possible to reuse the download link, all that they could do was to contact support who probably got so many calls and emails the first days that users who actually paid for the album decided to get the album from Bittorrent alternatively.

Listeners without a Credit Card or Paypal account have no means of acquiring the album legally at the moment. Everyone who does not know about the website In Rainbows probably wonders why the album is not in stores but on Torrent sites.

I don’t want to excuse sharing this album though. This band deserves the support and users should grab it from the official website if possible. I especially can’t say that it helped Radiohead when users downloaded the album from Bittorrent instead of the Radiohead website.

First, if you download the album from Bittorrent you also spread it there which means that you helped spreading the album to thousands of users. Second, the calculation surely has a chapter for upselling stuff to users that registered on the official website. It can be anything from news of new albums, tours, merchandise and maybe even free stuff.

Radiohead should learn from the mistakes and at least offer options to listen to the album before making the purchase, create a user friendly buying process, use download links that are valid for 24 hours, offer different Kbits and formats and other payment options as well.

I can’t see that this is going to be a model for all the big bands out there. Imagine you have to register to each bands website in order to download and buy the latest album. There has to be some major plattform in the future that offers those downloads and functionality that was missing in this case.

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What makes this rather unique is the approach of the band. Instead of asking for a certain price for the album they let the fans decide what they would like to pay for it. Yes, that is right, you can pay $0 or $100 or even more if you like. Everyone may download the In Rainbows album afterwards.

Even if you select to pay $0 for the album – or better a digital download of it – you have to pay a fee for the credit card transaction. This is however a very interesting experiment which will most likely be a success for Radiohead.

A discbox will also be released which is essentially a double vinyl/double CD release. Everyone purchasing the discbox may also download the music from the website. The discbox will be priced at £40 including shipping and handling.

Read More:

In Rainbows

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