Melbourne: Radiohead’s move to allows fans to decide what to pay for digitally downloading their seventh studio album In Rainbows, seems to have paid off generously.
The band has refused to reveal how many people have ordered the album, or what they paid.
However, reports from Britain have suggested that 1.2 million fans "bought" it from the band's website on its first day of sale.
A survey conducted by The Times of 3000 fans, who bought the album, found that the average price paid was 4 pounds -- about half the usual price of an album on iTunes.
On the first day alone, on those figures, the band would have collected more than 10 million dollars, and by axing middleman -- the record company -- the band will earn every cent of it.
If the group had contracted to a record company, they would have had to sell 10 times that number of physical albums to collect the same profit.
Reportedly 700,000 orders have been taken for the deluxe-boxed version of ‘In Rainbows,’ which includes a double vinyl disc, a book, eight bonus tracks and two CDs and a download free of digital rights management, which restricts copies from being made. Mark Richardson, who has worked with record companies such as Sony but has now set up a management business, Forum 5, in Richmond, Melbourne, has said that the business of record companies may sink.
"The floodgates are open," age.com.au quoted Richardson, as saying.
"The modern market says that the current model is out of date. There's still plenty of money in the music industry, but businesses have to change with the times. Radiohead and Madonna have shown that there are alternatives," he added.
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