10 years ago (October 10), Radiohead released ‘In Rainbows’ via their own website, allowing fans to pay as much or as little as they wished.
Some people hailed it as a revolution for the music industry, and a new model for other bands to follow. Others fretted that Radiohead were potentially destroying the careers of thousands of smaller bands by making music seem worthless. There was, it’s fair to say, a lot of over-excitement.
10 years on, though, who was right? ‘In Rainbows’ was a hugely important, influential moment that should inspire today’s bands for two reasons.
First: because it showed that the best response to music piracy is to explore new, legal ways to get music into fans’ hands. Don’t get hung up on the specific method used here – the pay-what-you-want ‘honesty box’ – but rather see it as a simple example of Radiohead trying something new.
Second: ‘In Rainbows’ absolutely didn’t kill the idea that music should be paid for. What it did do, though, was show that the idea of setting a single, one-size-fits-all price for an album was long overdue a rethink. Not just because a lot of people wanted to pay less or nothing, but because plenty of fans wanted to pay more.
Before explaining those properly, it’s worth remembering some of the criticism of ‘In Rainbows’ after its launch in October 2007. A Guardian piece that month linked Radiohead’s scheme with Prince’s decision to give his new album away with the Mail on Sunday, suggesting they’d “made it increasingly hard for new acts to survive”.
Some big RAWK dinosaurs were also unimpressed. Gene Simmons of Kiss, for example: “That’s not a business model that works. I open a store and say ‘Come on in and pay whatever you want.’ Are you on fucking crack? Do you really believe that’s a business model that works?”
Others thought Radiohead didn’t go far enough. Trent Reznor, for example, criticised ‘In Rainbows’ as “very much a bait and switch, to get you to pay for a MySpace quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale”.
Meanwhile, U2’s manager Paul McGuinness reckoned the move had “backfired” citing piracy stats showing “60-70 per cent of the people who downloaded the record stole it anyway, even though it was available for free”.
(In fairness, his client Bono stuck up for the band in a letter to the NME, saying they’d been “courageous and imaginative in trying to figure out some new relationship with their audience… Such imagination and courage are in short supply right now”.)
It’s true: a lot of people downloaded ‘In Rainbows’ for free, including on BitTorrent. In November 2007, market research firm comScore claimed that only 38 per cent of ‘In Rainbows’ downloaders had paid, while 62 per cent chose to get it for free – meaning an average price paid overall of $2.26 per download.
Radiohead quickly slammed that research as “wholly inaccurate”, but some better stats came later from British collecting society MCPS-PRS and internet metrics firm BigChampagne, who estimated that 400,000 copies of ‘In Rainbows’ were downloaded on BitTorrent on its day of release alone. Over its first 24 days, the album notched up 2.3m torrent downloads.
A big fat failure, then? Not at all.
“In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that’s nuts,” said in December 2007, when interviewed by David Byrne for Wired Magazine.