RADIOHEAD SAMPLES 'PAY WHAT YOU WANT' BUT WON'T TALK SALES

The music-industry site Music Ally has news of some numbers relating to Radiohead's pioneering "pay whatever you want" experiment with their album In Rainbows. The stats come from a speech given by Jane Dyball, head of business affairs for the band's record label, Warner Chappell. The unfortunate part about her comments, however - which were made in honour of the one-year anniversary of the album's release - is that they don't really tell us a heck of a lot that we didn't already know.

One of the first things Dyball says is that the digital publishing income from In Rainbows "dwarfed all the band's previous digital publishing income and made a 'material difference' to Warner Chappell U.K.'s digital income." That's not saying much, unfortunately. Before the downloadable album idea came along, Radiohead wasn't on iTunes and hadn't done anything much in the way of other digital sales either, so just about anything would have dwarfed all its previous digital-publishing income. Making a "material difference" to Warner U.K.'s digital income doesn't really tell us much either.

The one concrete figure we do get is that there were three million CD versions of the album sold, whether through the In Rainbows site (which offered the CD or a special-edition boxed set) or through other digital music outlets. That's an impressive number given that the band's previous albums sold in the low hundreds of thousands, and not bad for something Trent Reznor said was "just a marketing gimmick."

But unfortunately, we get no information from Dyball about the average price paid for the downloads, which is critical when it comes to determining whether the experiment would make sense for others. For more details and links, please see the Ingram 2.0 blog at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts.