[link]

Radiohead Album Price Tag: ‘It’s Up to You’

By Mike Nizza

How much would you pay for the next Radiohead album, “In Rainbow”? This is not a trick question: Your answer will be as binding as a dictator’s edict.

“IT’S UP TO YOU,” the rock band’s site informs customers pre-ordering the digital download, which will be available Oct. 10. Doubters get a second assurance: “NO REALLY. IT’S UP TO YOU.”

As proof, the order form’s section for price is blank — and it will accept the lowest possible amount for the site: One British penny (about two American cents). After a perfunctory credit-card charge, Radiohead, one of the most popular and innovative rock bands of the past two decades, will gladly hand over a copy of the whole album for less than a dollar, PC World concluded in an article noting that Apple’s iTunes Music Store was left out of this deal.

There is no maximum price, nor any other guidance, setting up what is may be the biggest experiment in digital-era music-industry pricing to date. What are people willing to pay for music? How many will pay full price? How will the average price compare to what a typical record company would likely have charged? Will people pirate it anyway?
radioheadThom Yorke, Radiohead’s front man, playing at Madison Square Garden in 2006. (Photo: Rahav Segev for The New York Times)

No one knows the answers to these questions yet, but the offer has set industry observers alight with grand expectations. Reactions gathered by a music magazine invoked the words “revolution” and “lasting impact.”

Pete Paphides, chief rock critic of The Guardian, estimated the stakes: “If this experiment works, it will – at the click of a few million mice – make them the most powerful band in Britain.”

And Bob Lefsetz, the author of a well-read and curse-addled newsletter on the music industry, celebrated (in so many words) Radiohead’s scheme because it cuts out the middle man — the music labels that control distribution to music stores — and connects the band directly with the listener:

This is the industry’s worst nightmare. Superstar band, THE superstar band, forging ahead by its own wits. Proving that others can too. And they will.

This is what happens when you sell twenty dollar CDs with one good track and sue your customers for [file-sharing]. This is what happens when you believe you’re ENTITLED to your business. This is what happens when music is a second-class citizen only interested in the bottom line.

“Well played, gentlemen,” Pitchfork Media, an indie rock Web magazine, concluded after adding up all the angles:

Rather than preface their new album’s release with the usual three months of press ballyhoo, only to have it leak at some random time before it comes out, they’ve kept it completely under wraps, then essentially gone and leaked it themselves. What’s more, they’ve turned this into a moral question of sorts, by giving us the freedom to pay actual money for what amounts to an album leak.

Pitchfork also outlined the two other ways the album will be sold in the future: as a premium boxed set costing $81 and as a standard CD, which would arrive in stores next year.

If you’ve stayed this long before rushing over there to pre-order the album, why not stay a little longer to leave your 2 cents on the 2-cent album. How much would you pay to download Radiohead’s or your favorite band’s next album?