By now everyone has heard (and posted) about Radiohead’s revolutionary sales model for their new album, In Rainbows, which is set to be released on October 10. I made a post back in April about a new market-priced music store called Amie Street, which I declared marked the beginning of the end of the RIAA. That may have been a little optimistic, but Radiohead’s decision to let the consumer choose its price for digital downloads just might end up sparking a revolution in the music industry. Here are some quotes I pulled from two articles (in the New York Times and Time), the first of which was written before Radiohead’s announcement, about the future of the industry. Leave a comment and let us know where you think it’s headed.
“This feels like yet another death knell,” emailed an A&R executive at a major European label. “If the best band in the world doesn’t want a part of us, I’m not sure what’s left for this business.”
“Radiohead is the best band in the world; if you can pay whatever you want for music by the best band in the world, why would you pay $13 dollars or $.99 cents for music by somebody less talented? Once you open that door and start giving music away legally, I’m not sure there’s any going back.”
“A generation of kids got used to the idea that music was free, and given the infinite amount of freely — if illegally — available music out there, it was hard to argue with the facts on the ground. Music seemed free, so it was free. It didn’t help that the industry had been gouging consumers for years with high CD prices; prices rose even as the cost of producing CDs plummeted. Digital downloads should have made it possible to slash prices for recorded music, but the majors have done their best to keep prices at around a dollar a track — an artificially high price point that makes piracy more attractive than it should be.” -Peter Rojas, founder of Engadget and co-founder of RCRD LBL, a free, online-only music label launched by Downtown Records.
“For as long as the woes of MP3s, file sharing and CD burning have existed, solutions to them have existed as well, although their attractiveness and cost of implementation may have changed. These solutions include combining advertising with free consumption, subscription services, and transactional unit-based sales of secure formats. Given the fact that the public has gotten used to sharing music for free, getting people to abandon this notion will be extremely difficult.
Regardless of what created this mess, if we accept that free music has become the model for consumption, then we have little choice but to invest in advertising-supported free services that will make this type of consumption profitable. This step will require patience, leadership and a long-term view. After formulating a way to recapture the revenue it’s losing, the industry can then address the development of a new, secure file format that offers audio, meta-data, and other digital features superior to those of MP3s. This should be an easy task, and will give the industry access to both ad-supported free “iPod quality” MP3s, and higher-quality digital products that can be sold directly.” -Scott Gottlieb, President of TVT Records
“Meanwhile, as record sales decline, the concert business is booming. In July, Prince gave away his album Planet Earth for free in the U.K. through the downmarket Mail on Sunday newspaper. At first he was ridiculed. Then he announced 21 consecutive London concert dates — and sold out every one of them.”
Radiohead - Bodysnatchers (live)
-Danny
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