Radiohead may have moved 1.2 million copies of its new album “In Rainbows” when it was released last week, but according to industry analysts, over 500,000 copies were downloaded through old-fashioned file sharing networks, eroding the perceived success of the distribution plan and possibly hindering similar release plans for other artists in the future.
The Forbes journalist writes, “But more surprising is that fans chose to steal music they could legally download for any price they choose,” but it’s not clear whether that’s the analyst’s opinion or the writer’s. At any rate, we think it’s overstating the issue. Even the analyst admits that it’s not proof that Radiohead’s fans are a mutinous lot of anarchists:
Garland argues that this kind of digital theft is more a matter of habit than of economics. “People don’t know Radiohead’s site. They do know their favorite BitTorrent site and they use it every day,” he says. “It’s quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version.”
We know someone (ahem)* who couldn’t complete the check-out process on three separate occasions on the day the album was released, and who subsequently went the file-sharing route—but this is exactly the problem with Radiohead’s experiment, says a university professor:
But for Doug Lichtman, an intellectual property professor at the UCLA School of Law, the volume of piracy following In Rainbows’ release erodes the success of Radiohead’s innovation. “If the community rejects even forward-thinking experiments like this one, real harm is done to the next generation of experimentation and change,” he says.Lichtman speculates that users may have interpreted Radiohead’s offer as a giveaway and so felt more comfortable downloading the album from other free sources. Fans may also have been turned off by the band’s requirement that users register by providing their name and e-mail and postal addresses.
* This person went back and bought the album legitimately via the website at a later date.
“Free? Steal It Anyway” [Forbes via Slashdot]
(Photo: Getty)
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The interesting thing is that the people; whom illegally uploaded/downloaded the album from other sources, only got the 10 songs. I think (just my opinion) Radiohead new this would happen, I don’t get why many people got problems paying from waste site, so far my transaction was very fast. And I was pleased!
The great thing is that I will have my 17 songs in a double CD and 2 records by December. For sure an unscrupulous person (or may I say people) will upload/download the whole album, that’s for sure. And that’s sad. Me, as an Artist it is very disturbing.
…Radiohead knew this would happen. Sorry!
I got to their checkout thinking I’d pay about 75% of what it would cost at Wally World, but when I saw that they wanted more personal information than required for a credit card payment or Paypal submission, I said, “Screw this. I don’t NEED their music.”
So I went to iTunes and picked up Travis’s “Singles” album for $9.95. One click.
I didn’t buy (but didn’t download either) when I heard the pay-to-download tracks were not even 320kbps. What was the bitrate on the p2p files? How many downloaders bought the disc/download but wanted (ironically) better quality tracks? And how many downloaders simply didn’t have a credit card (or are too young to have one)?
I went to their site and was disappointed at how visually messy it was, the lack of any demo tracks so I could hear what I was buying first, and I never did even find the page to enter my CC info. It was overall a disappointing experience. I’m not surprised to hear this at all. Perhaps it really was more of a publicity stunt than a serious attempt at breaking traditional music channels.
What seems to be missed on this is questioning of the veracity of the data being offered. This “Big Champagne” company is frequently being quoted by “big media” for having accurate file share download statistics when such data are impossible to get. They don’t publish their methodologies, and in fact when pressed will say that they aren’t measuring downloads per se, but more searches and offerings. A pretty good breakdown of what they apparently do (and don’t do) is available here. Bottom line: there is no one way to accurately aggregate how many people have downloaded a song/album through file-sharing.
So you add the fact that the official server was hammered (according to the posters here), that file sharers who downloaded from the official server probably put it in their shared offerings (sharers do as sharers do), and the flawed data from Big Champagne and you have Forbes making extremely flawed conclusions. They spend a lot of time in the article focusing on the sharing, but spend little time talking of the success of the offering. In fact the one paragraph describing the scope of the success (judging from everyone’s complaint about the servers being down it’s clear the label greatly underestimated the popularity) is poo-pooed in the following paragraph. Only the label knows the amount of money made, but considering all the free publicity this stunt generated, plus the highly reduced cost of the offering, it is a highly profitable means of offering the music. That the label chairman is applauding the results, and not using the opportunity to decry how the label is “losing out” to piracy even given these “damning numbers” says a lot as to the success of the program. When is the last time you’ve heard a label not using a readily available opportunity to cry how piracy is ruining the business?
doesn’t mean shit, Some people did both.
HAHA I got a faster download for free. I put the price as 0.00…..I just wanted to try out the music, but I didn’t like it so, in the recycle bin it goes. Oh well. This is funny, but I guess their servers would be overloaded (or they’d get a huge bandwidth bill) if that (500K people using 0.00 as the purchase price) happened. (so the file sharing thing actually saved them money?)
@JKinNYC: I think a lot of users had problems with the download from the Radiohead site. I didn’t, but I also saw the email come in @ 1:42AM my time and immediately downloaded it. I saw a thread on WIRED with a bunch of pissed-off people who hadn’t “gotten what they paid for”. So I’m sure the vast majority of the “pirates” were paid users that had trouble. And, while I’m sure it wasn’t intended, Radiohead effectively saved the cost of bandwidth for all of those users that went to BT instead of their servers. Maybe that should be the model – let users pick their flavor – BT users get a torrent file first and direct download users get their link later.
Oh, and by the way, I bought not one but two of the $80 box sets.