The band Radiohead has undergone some major changes fairly recently. Their record contract with EMI Records expired in 2004 and since have been working independently without rules and restraints of any sort but their own. Their last record release was with EMI, called "Hail to the Thief", and just released their newest entitled "In Rainbows".
There are a number of cool things that came along with this album. For one, the band's site design is entirely based around the album. The background is this sort of psychedelic moving tie-dye design with a sans-serif block text outlining (very few) details about the album. Really neat; grabs and keeps the users attention quickly.
Secondly, and most importantly (...and shockingly), the album has no set price tag. You choose what you want to pay for it. You can download it or order a CD copy on the spot for whatever price you like. I wanted to discover if there was a catch, so I chose to pay 0 pounds for the download.
While I am waiting for my free download, I get a message telling me "We value your custom. You are currently in a queue." This message was up for about 2 minutes, and really made me think about things. I started asking myself a number of questions. For one, how hard did these guys work to produce something for me to listen to and hopefully enjoy? To answer this question, I did what a large number of people do when they seek information about something they don't know a lot about; I turned to Wikipedia to see what they had on the subject. I discovered it took them just over two years to produce. That's a lot of sweat and blood for some music. In between songwriting and recording, they contributed a song to the official War Child charity album: Help - A Day in the Life. I started to wonder, am I a bad person for paying nothing even if the band clearly gave me the option? This message seemed like an obvious guilt trip at the time, but in a good way.
This post is by no means meant to preach to you in any way, but if you've ever listened to any Radiohead and like what you hear, I encourage you to check out their site. Download or order a copy of the album. Decide for yourself what to pay for it. While you do this, think about the massive decline in album sales in the past decade. What I believe Radiohead is trying to do with this is almost like their own form of quantitative and qualitative research. Everybody in the music world is talking about In Rainbows in blogs, comment posts, newspapers and more. There's your basis for qualitative analysis. The band also has the records of how much people have paid for it. Here we have the quantitative.
Before you go ahead and buy the album, think about these things. Ask yourself what you think a reasonable price for any full-length album would be. What would you like to see as a standard sticker price on CD shelves in HMV?
1 comment:
Interestingly enough, you only get the "We Value Your Custom" waiting screen if you specify a price of 0. Perhaps it's intentional to make you think while you wait. Personally, I downloaded it for free, then actually BOUGHT a copy. Once I did, I noticed the lack of a waiting screen.
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