You have to take your hat off to them. Some said they wouldn't make a penny by allowing fans to choose what they wanted to pay to download their new album 'In Rainbows' - but Radiohead have pocketed around £5 million quid in the first six days!
On average fans have paid exactly £4 to download the 10 tracks from Radiohead's website, and when you multiply that by the number of people who have done so (1.2 million), it works out as a heck of a lot of steak dinners for the Oxford rockers (of course, as their probably all vegans it will be Quorn dinners).
So while fans still only paid about half of what new CDs cost in stores, Radiohead has made nearly $10 million dollars in less than a week.
If the figures are to be believed, a revolution in the way audiences receive their music may change the music industry forever. Because Radiohead is no longer affiliated with a record label, the vast majority of the 'In Rainbows' profit will go to them, with minimal overheads. Compare this to selling it through an online store (iTunes, Snocap, etc), and they could only see as little as 25% of that profit.
“I remember thinking: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could ask Sting to sing that line?’ Suddenly someone said: ‘Sting’s here on holiday! He’s on the beach!’” How Mark Knopfler got lucky with Money For Nothing
“I got to jam with Stevie Wonder. Just me and him, one afternoon. We each had a keyboard and we were just trading riffs and jamming together and it was like, ‘Wow’”: Howard Jones talks vintage gear, his new piano album and that 1985 Grammys synth medley
