PaidContent today picked up on a story by Big Champaign, a company which monitors file sharing activity. Mashable then joined in with an article entitled “Free wasn’t cheap enough for Radiohead fans” and All things Digital even put up a story about it.

Mashable had this to say on the subject:

“Free isn’t cheap enough for us, apparently. When a band like Radiohead comes out with an album, puts it up on a website for us, and gets more press coverage than just about any album release in recent memory, and says “Hey, pay us for it if you want to,“  we still feel the need to “steal it” off Bittorrent.”

I have no intention of going into the ethics of downloading music, I just found this such a completely pointless report. He continues with this:

“In Rainbows torrent downloads peaked on the first day data was collected, October 27, at 400,000 – what Page and Garland call “a bloody big number”. How big? More than double the top torrent through March and May (Panic At The Disco’s Pretty Odd) got in a whole week (ie. 10 times Panic’s daily average).”

What these reports all seem to forget is that Radiohead is a big band. One of the biggest in the world in fact, but contrast Panic at the Disco is not. Would you expect more people to be interested in Radiohead?

Also most importantly does anyone remember Radiohead’s download server’s crashing due to the amount of demand? Even when it was operating it sure was pretty damn slow to download the album, how does it not make sense that people would just use Bittorrent to get the album.

Considering Radiohead was giving the album for free, you could say it was even beneficial to download from bittorrent seeing as it would save the bandwidth for Radiohead.

I personally would be extremely hesitant to mouth off and tell article just about sums it up perfectly:

“andrew, why don’t you let anyone on the web take your column and post it free, and not get paid by the ft, either…since you love free love and all”

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