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Interestingly, the release of "In Rainbows" has been identified as one of the dumbest moves of the year by Fortune magazine. The logic for this is that two thirds of the buyers did not actually pay anything for it, with the remaining third paying around six dollars. This certainly seems pretty bad - on iTunes it would have sold for $7.99 for the album. This assumes, of course, that all the people who downloaded it for free would have bought it from iTunes, rather than... downloading it for free.
Also worth noting that the royalty for a download from iTunes would have been a dollar per album, whereas the profit on the donations for this were pure profit - which means they actually doubled their money on the same number of downloads. So, was the unit cost per download more than a dollar per? I very much doubt it. Which means that Radiohead, personally, probably made more on selling "In Rainbows" than they would have if they had released it through the usual channels, at least on digital downloads.
That's interesting - and it's interesting that Fortune is portraying it as a stupid move, as if, say, there would have been no free file sharing of the album if Radiohead themselves had not facilitated them. The people who do most certainly lose out here are the record label, which would have received a sizeable cut from the iTunes music store for whoever many albums were sold there. |
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