4th
‘The Economics Of Free’ Win Again
It’s been difficult to get a straight analysis of Radiohead’s groundbreaking, pay-what-you-want-online record release strategy for its latest effort, In Rainbows. Lots of winking and nodding and declining to comment.
But Wired gives a nice breakdown of a new British study of how torrent downloads affected the sanctioned downloads at the band’s official site. The verdict? First, there’s a jillion tech-savvy Radiohead fans out there. Second and more important, especially for the music business on the whole:
“The hard lesson to the music business here is that it must license venues for music acquisition that fans prefer to file sharing networks or otherwise make the toleration of file sharing part of their business plans. If even Radiohead’s freely available album was torrented 2.3 million times in the first three and a half weeks, how can more traditional offerings successfully clamp-down on file sharing? They can’t, pure and simple.”
Ouch.
Even when an album is basically free, it boils down to what venue a downloader is more comfortable with. That often means illegal torrent sites. This reminds me of Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame’s upcoming book, “FREE.” Here’s a great intro to some of its principles, also from Wired.
