Radiohead
Originally written for The Times and published here. This is the first draft.
Radiohead have announced that their new recording The King of Limbs will be available to download from Saturday for the princely sum of £6.
This is difficult second album syndrome – Radiohead got so much attention for their “pay what you like” pricing stunt for In Rainbows, what could they do to top it? The answer is they can’t and that this represents a retreat from a bold experiment to a new conservatism.
Radiohead never released figures for their honesty box pricing strategy, but one thing is for certain, if it raked in oodles of cash then they’d be doing it again.
Let’s face it, £6 is an unremarkable price for a new album – the average for the current top 10 CDs on Amazon is £6.30. Presumably Radiohead are looking for an improvement on the £3.88 per paid download (not including freeloaders) estimated by the Record of The Day survey in 2007.
Hopefully this signals the death of people sitting in marketing meetings going: “well Radiohead said the community would set the price”. What’s interesting is the bit they are doing again: a poncey second edition for the super-fans at a hugely inflated price.
In Rainbows offered a “diskbox” version for £40 featuring two 12″ records; this time the die-hards can buy The King of Limbs, “the world’s first newspaper album” for £33, containing lots of bits of artwork, and possibly a bitter reference to the similarly struggling business model faced by the newspaper industry.
But this quick turnaround – five days between announcement and release – is smart. It might even get their official product to market minutes before the
pirates pounce.
This is a launch on Internet time. There’s less opportunity for this to be leaked, and less time for excitement to fizzle out.
Expect to see more of this in the future from other bands as these ideas prove themselves: shorter release times, and more expensive physical packages for the hardcore.
Frankly, my tip to Radiohead is to run a cut price version of the service other artists provide for Russian Oligarchs. If Amy Winehouse does private gigs for Roman Abramovich at £1m a pop, then for £500 Thom could phone you up and warble his paranoid conspiracy theories for 10 mins. Or sell you a wink with his good eye for 50p. Kerr-ching.
But as a music lover the one bit missing from this DIY approach is the lack of co-operation with streaming networks. In Rainbows was not available via Spotify and no one knows what is going on with this new offering. Which suggests a role for record companies yet, a sort of capitalist trade union for acts to thrash out deals between all the places a modern music fan expects to find their heroes: youtube, last.fm, pandora et al.
Still, the whole package makes them still look cooler than Prince, who coped with the disintegrating CD market by suing his fan websites then giving away his music with The Daily Mail. And let’s hope, once the marketing fluff settles, Radiohead’s new music is as thought provoking as their business models.
The King of Limbs is available as an MP3 download via www.thekingoflimbs.com on 19th February 2011.
