Radiohead: 1 Week, 1.2 Million Downloads and $10 Million Profit

[tedster]

With no label, no promotions, and direct access to fans, Radiohead gave up its music for free and asked for donations, whatever fans deemed reasonable, in return. What the band got was an average of $8 per album sold, bringing estimates of profit to about $10 million. Not too shabby for one week.

[mashable.com...]

Digital downloads, publicized via social media. The times, they are definitely a-changin'.

[thecoalman]

...this just in, RIAA excutive hauled away by men in white coats ranting statements like "people are thieves, you must make them pay" in a related story Sony/BGM excutives have seemed to have jumped ...

This is best piece of news I've seen in a while for music industry, the fans are happy because they are getting music at a price they can afford. The band is happy because all that money is going into their pockets instead of some fat excutive... everyone wins.

Hopefully other mega-acts will see this success and jump on the bandwagon and we can say bye bye MPAA and music can go back to being about the music.

[edited by: lawman at 12:58 pm (utc) on Oct. 21, 2007]
[edit reason] Spelling [/edit]

[Lord Majestic]

What those articles miss big time to mention is how much money they would have earned if they sold so many albums through one of the franchised members of the music mafia - I doubt they would have achieved more than $2 of profit per sold disk, so in this case they made as much money as they would have made if the mafia sold 4 times more CDs.

Good on Radiohead I say - very good for consumers, and at the same time very bad for music cartel which is a superb thing too.

[londrum]

radiohead got stacks and stacks of free exposure in the press though, because they were the first band to try it.

as soon as it becomes the norm to do this then the free exposure will die away. then bands will have to revert back to spending some of their profit on advertising, on getting the music heard -- which is what the labels are good at.

[thecoalman]

I doubt they would have achieved more than $2 of profit per sold disk

After reading this topic here I read a few others and one of them pegged it at 50 cents. I'd imagine that varies by artist and/or their contractural obligations.

[weeks]

londrum makes a good point, but to extend it on out, the way music is sold AND promoted is changing. Radio play was once what got music noticed. Now, mention is flashed around via blogs and digital social networks, all which used to be called word of mouth.

Radiohead had a brand they could exploit. Thing is, Warner, Sony and such never really added anything to a brand. iTunes, on the other hand, could become a brand of sorts.

The same thing is happening to all media. Soon there will be movies without a major distributor. News is coming from all kinds of sources. Publishing? It is falling apart more slowly, but it's happening.

The only old media really hanging in there is magazines. They were once second tier channels in many regards, but they are becoming more and more important.

[Lord Majestic]

What is happening now is removal of a big middleman sitting between content creators and content consumers - this middleman was taking good 90% of gross revenues, this is way too high of a margin - the only reason they managed to keep it is because they created what is effectively an illegal cartel such as RIAA.