Ryan MacMillan

Radiohead are brilliant. Fact. The lastest in a long line of reasons for me liking Radiohead is this rather exciting peice of news: the price for downloading their new album - In Rainbows released October 10th - is entirely up to you. Thats right, you choose how much to pay for it. Seriously.

This is officially cool. However, its worth noting that Radiohead are also offering a £40 ‘Discbox’ which will include all sorts of exciting extras.

I think what we can infer from this is that Thom, Jonny and co. are so confident in the devotion of their fans that the £40 ‘Discbox’ will, despite its frankly obscene RRP, sell like proverbial hot-cakes.

This is a landmark case in DRM and album sale methodology. No one has ever tried user-generated album pricing online. It’ll be interesting to see how successful such a ploy is. Personally I don’t think this will prove to be a great success financially but then bands rarely see more than 10% of their album sales profits in their own bank accounts so in that sense, their split from EMI and decision to go it alone will loose them nothing they weren’t already having taken by their management. Plus tours will always make them money. Oh, and y’know they’re all millionaire’s anyway.

Is this really the future of album sales? Can Radiohead really bring down the Music Industry? How much will Matt pay for ‘In Rainbows’? Find out all this and more in our next exciting installment…