Improve Your Music

The band Radiohead made all the news shows and papers this year after announcing they were going to release an album and let the fans decide how much, if anything, they would pay.

It seems like a pretty brave move to let the customer have the product for free with no guarantee of any return but are you just setting yourself up to be ripped off?

“Online busking” is a term that’s been around for a little while but it’s usually associated with the smaller, more independent part of the industry. This was busking on a pretty grand scale!

So how did they go? According to the usually pessimistic Sydney Morning Herald, not too good.

AN EXPERIMENT by the band Radiohead to allow fans to determine the price of their latest album may have backfired, according to a new report.

It found that three in five people who downloaded In Rainbows from the internet paid nothing for it.

Fans around the world paid an average of £2.90 ($6.50) for In Rainbows.

The band shocked the music industry last month when they announced that fans could pay as much or as little as they wanted for their seventh album.

Initial reports suggested that followers of the band were willing to pay up to £99, the maximum available price for the recordings, with more than half paying £10. But a report by the internet monitoring company comScore found that 62 per cent of the estimated 1.2 million people who downloaded the album paid nothing. The study was based on the online behaviour of more than 2 million internet users worldwide.

Let’s look at that again though. They estimate that 1.2 million people downloaded the album and about 38% paid something for it. That’s 456000 paying customers folks! At an average payment of $6.50 the band have “only” grossed $2,964,000.00 as of November 2007. I don’t know about you but that’s a pretty good failure in my book. Sure the sales would have been higher with a record company to push it, but the record company takes a massive chunk of cash for doing this. Maybe it’s better to settle for a smaller markeplace but a bigger piece of the pie? Maybe it’s not even about the money but about control of your work.

Here’s what Thom from the band had to say:

we did not ask for a load of cash from our old record label EMI to re- sign.
that is a L I E.
The Times in the UK should check its facts before it prints such dirt.

whAT we WANTED WAS some control over OUR WOrK and how it was used in the future by them-
that seemed REASONAblE to us,
as we cared about it a great deal.

Mr Hands was not interested.
So neither were we.

I know you’re saying that a band like Radiohead can do this because they’ve already had the exposure from being part of a record company. Sure, but look at the other side of the coin. Radiohead have received massive publicity from their “online busking” experiment simply because they are doing something a bit different and a bit newsworthy.

Small independent acts and artists can use tools such as the internet to try the online busking experiment too. It’s relatively cheap to record an album or EP these days and services like paypal make it easy to set up a “donate now” button where your fans can throw a few dollars your way. Here’s an example of a simple page doing exactly that.

Maybe you want more control like the guys from Radiohead. Maybe you want a bigger piece of the pie without the record company putting their hand in your pocket. Maybe the record companies aren’t even interested in you. Whatever the reason, It wouldn’t be a bad idea to release just a few songs and put the hat out. You just never know what might come from it. Here’s another thought too. How much extra effort would you put into your music if you knew that the customer could set his or her own price?

If you’ve had any experience of online busking I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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