Radiohead Crush Me With Awesomeness

Who cares that Led Zeppelin tickets are being announced today…let’s focus on a bigger music element, Radiohead has a new album ready and it’s out in ten days.

WHAT THE HECK?

While every other band and their mother releases an album months after announcement, they’ve decided to go a different route (which is zany) and release it in ten days.

Here’s the scoop:

– Essentially, in ten days, you have access to a digital copy (read: download) of the new album. You buy it for any price you want to pay. It can be zero dollars. It can be ten dollars. It can be $100. Whatever you want to pay, you pay.

– There is also an $80 box set which includes the album on CD, the album on double vinyl, a bonus CD full of other songs, artwork, other things, plus some artwork. While $80 seems a little steep to me, I do know that there are manic Radiohead fans out there that would pay this in a heartbeat.

– Later in 2008, there will be a regular CD released.

So, let’s look at this immensity of this announcement – mainly, a ‘pay whatever you want’ download.

Now, there have been programs set up in the past which allows you to give money to an artist if you’ve downloaded their work. So if I downloaded the new Spice Girls album and thought it was amazing, I would go to a certain site and this business would send the money I feel they deserve for the album to the band to divvy up amongst themselves. Pretty good idea, don’t know if it ever really worked.

There are some interesting marketing experiments coming from the ‘pay whatever you want’ Radiohead album. It would be interesting to see how many people pay money for it, and what the average price point comes out to. I’m going to be honest here, if I knew I would never buy the physical CD, or the box set in the future, I could definitely see me forking out $10 for the album. It’s the least I can do. Others will just grab it because it’s free because that’s just what they want to do, which is fine. I think Radiohead is in a position in life where they realize that they have tons of money, they have enough fans that will still make them tons of money (so let’s make a super awesome box set that the fans want) and just think about the music in the end. Someone brought up an excellent point that a band starting out couldn’t really pull this off. While I agree that they probably couldn’t pull it off and MAKE MONEY, anyone can release their own music to the public.

It would also be interesting to see how many people downloaded it and THEN bought the album, but I think that’s a hard correlation to make unless someone orders it directly from the website when the regular CD becomes available. When the music spread out on the Internet, there are some good arguments that state that MORE music has been sold because MORE people get access to MORE bands. Instead of relying on my buddy telling me about a great album to listen to, I find out for myself if it’s worthy of a purchase. I still fall into the habit of buying first, listening later, but there have been some choices which have shocked me into regretting the purchase (Spider-Man 3 and Rob Thomas solo album, I’m looking at you!).

In the end, Radiohead can do no wrong with this strategy. They’ve essentially given us a free download preview of their album (or if you want to send some money their way, awesome), they’ve given their super-fans a really great box set with the album (as opposed to the horrid special edition of Zeitgeist that the Smashing Pumpkins released. Even I, a devout Pumpkins fan, could not bring himself to buy that load of crap…let’s not even get into the whole seven different versions at different stores with different tracks on each album. COME ON!) and they won’t be screwing over the common fan (like me) because they’ll eventually release an actual CD someday in the future.

I don’t know if I’m going to buy the $80 box set. I can’t say I’m a uber-fan…but I think I’ll download the album for free and follow up with an actual album purchase in the new year.