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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Pennywise is the latest band to release a music album for free. Their album Reason to Believe is available at Myspace at a bitrate of 320 kbit/s including the pdf booklet and jpg cover. All that needs to be done is to add the user Textango as a friend at Myspace who will send a message that includes the download link. The music is DRM free.

Textango seems to be a mobile music distributor according to Wikipedia. Pennywise is a Punk-Rock band in case you have not heard of them before, comparable to Bad Religion in many aspects.

The album Reason to Believe will also be sold in stores in Europe and America.

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The second band that created such a stir was the band Nine Inch Nails with the release of their album Ghosts Volumes One though Four. The first nine songs of the album were available freely on the NIN website with lots of extras including digital extras and a 40-paged PDF document.

Three additional packages were on sale that would add value to the free package. The most expensive one was a $300 deluxe release signed by Trent Reznor that was limited to 2500 copies. That limited release sold out after a couple of days which alone marks this experiment an success.

It should also be noted that the full release has been released under Creative Commons and can be downloaded from various Bittorrent sites throughout the Internet.

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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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Those bands are big and could influence others to try the same. I personally think it is time for a change. Bands earn (almost) nothing from record sales which is unexplainable to me. I read a nice essay from a music producer earlier who did produce a Nirvana record who said that while the Music Industry earned more than $1.5 Million from selling CDs the band actually made a minus from that.

I’m not an expert but I can predict that more artists will choose the risk of marketing albums on their own instead of making no money at all from it. The big ones will be first. Those who have enough fans and publicity to be able to do that.

But, musicians at the base are also already using the Internet to sell their records without Music Industry contracts. Marketplaces like eMusic or even Jamendo give them the publicity to reach an audience.

The question that arises is simply: Who needs the Record Companies ?

Read More:

Madonna dumps label in $134m deal
Nine Inch Nails
Oasis, Jamiroquai to follow Radiohead
Radiohead

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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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