Head over to the Midem blog and watch an interview in which Ed O’Brien discusses how they made a success of releasing ‘In Rainbows’ independently of any record labels, and what that success meant for their band.As one of the most important ‘game changing’ releases of recent years it’s interesting to hear O’Brien tell the big labels to sit up and take notice. Of course Radiohead had the benefits of already having been made famous working with record labels (XL, TBD, Parlophone, Capitol), and the novelty and notoriety of being one of the first big acts to give their music away, but there are lessons to be learnt.
Radiohead Guitarist Jonny Greenwood has revealed to the world that the band will play their new material During their sets at the Reading an Leeds festival this August bank holiday.
“These are my twisted Words”, which is available for download after being leaked onto the Internet for fans by the band last week. “We’ve been recording for a while” wrote Jonny, ” and this was one of the first we finished. We’re pretty proud of it. There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practising, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts.”
Other recent Radiohead releases include Harry Patch (in memory of) released 5 August and In Rainbows that came out October of last year. There are also rumours of a new Radiohead EP to be released this month but no evidence of this has materialized.
Excuse the pun, but the fallout from Radiohead’s decision to release their latest album on a pay-what-you-want download basis from their website has been widespread. As an exercise in self-promotion, it’s hard to imagine a better stunt, as they made headlines across the national media, and even weeks afterwards are still featuring heavily in the big music blogs. I’m listening to the album for the first time as I write, being among the reported 62% of people who opted to pay nothing for the download. Radiohead haven’t released official figures for the revenue from their experiment, and XL Recordings will have to wait and see what effect the free download has on the sale of CD’s and Vinyl when they are released in January. There will undoubtedly be more lessons learnt and surprises reported on this story. What is sure is that all eyes, and ears are tuned into the radio(head).
Update: The original Comscore report claims an average per download purchase price of $2.26 – if we assume that half of the visitors to inrainbows.com downloaded, and (Comscore reports 1.2 million of these users so far), that’s 1.35 million USD straight into the band’s coffers. Consider that their setup costs on the website are likely to be in the four figure arena, and that they’re (hopefully) retaining all of this revenue and you can see that for the big players, self promotion makes sense.
Head over to the Midem blog and watch an interview in which Ed O’Brien discusses how they made a success of releasing ‘In Rainbows’ independently of any record labels, and what that success meant for their band.As one of the most important ‘game changing’ releases of recent years it’s interesting to hear O’Brien tell the big labels to sit up and take notice. Of course Radiohead had the benefits of already having been made famous working with record labels (XL, TBD, Parlophone, Capitol), and the novelty and notoriety of being one of the first big acts to give their music away, but there are lessons to be learnt.