radiohead-in-rainbows-front.jpg

Their album (above) is practically FREE. There’s a textbox (see below) where the price should be - You are free to key in any value! You can key in even “0.00″ (YES, I’ve tried) and the system returns a sarcastic “We value your custom. You’re currently in a queue.” Radiohead keeps their promise though and you’re later brought to a registration page.

radiohead_rainbow.jpg

The picture above shows me keying in $1.99 for the entire album! When you hit the “?” icon on the pricing line, it leads you to -

radiohead_rainbow2.jpg

Hit the next “?” again and it says -

radiohead_rainbow3.jpg

Radiohead, one of my favourite bands, have taken leadership again - this time in the distribution and pricing of their precious product - Music.

Trust that People Pay for Good Work
Trust is really important. As an artist, one must have trust his/her works. One must also trust his/her audience. Even though I’m free to download it off for free, I won’t. I’ll pay a price, a fair price, which I’m still deciding. It should be around SGD $6, I guess.

Nearly Every Cent Goes to Radiohead
From an economics point of view, note that it costs almost nothing for Radiohead to distribute the digital songs online. Including transaction costs, it may cost them just SGD $0.50 per album. As a music lover, I would rather pay $6 and be sure that nearly every cent goes to supporting the artist than to pay $19.99 to feed the entire music industry value chain (from the record label, the CD press, the logistics company, the music store, the landlord…).

In anycase, if I didn’t want to pay for the music, I wouldn’t have paid anyway and would have downloaded off Bittorrent/Limewire/eMule/whatever.

And, I’m willing to wager, that Radiohead would get far more revenue per album download than if Radiohead had went the conventional way of selling plastic CDs.

This is because most people would deem themselves to be paying for a service, than for a physical object. And, the price of service, as you would already know are highly inelastic.

Discouraging Piracy with an Infinitely Fair System
It also encourages would-be-pirates to pay for a small sum, thereby effectively preventing petty piracy. It feels good to be paying a small amount to enjoy music. It’s a ridiculously fair system of payment - You only pay for what you think the music is worth!

All in all, it’s a not a zero-sum game. In fact, it’s very much positive indeed. Who’s the one crying “Downloading is Stealing”?

Eat this, RIAA!

Related Links
1. Time Magazine - Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want
2. HOLY SHIT: Radiohead’s In Rainbows Out In 10 Days!
3. Radiohead Amazes Me