Now, I'm certainly not going to enter that fray - I think there are good points being put forward by both camps.....
And, ultimately, it comes down to personal choice - for the downloader, and the downloadee....
But here is something to consider:
"My big concern is that the quality of recordings will decrease, and that musicians will not spend as much time in studios with the appropriate level of production for a quality recording. Yes the many many recordings within the long tail are breakthrough but they reverse the curve where quality is concerned if you were to grade them (in my opinion). If a band or record company (or what ever business model takes over) for producing recorded music without the chance of making a buck from it then......" from Fergal Kavanagh.
"Music is more vibrant than ever. More than ever before, our music is always with us, in our cars, on our PCs, and on the road in our phones and iPods. And if you add in the many millions of free downloads (legal or not) being grabbed every month, it's easy to see that there's more music being consumed than ever before. Unfortunately for the majors, they're just not getting paid for part of it." from Tony van Veen.
But following on from my previous post, concerning the continued evolution of the music industry...... I thought it might be interesting to throw some boomerang shaped thoughts out into the blogsphere, and see what comes back......
In light of the recent Prince, Radiohead, Madonna and NIN experiments in turning the music industry on it's head, it's interesting to consider a recent small reader's poll undertaken by Chris Anderson via his blog "The Long Tail', concerning the new Radiohead download.
I found some of the reader's responses thought provoking....
Chris asked his readers just how much they would be willing to pay for the recent Radiohead download. Their responses varied from $30.00 through to $0.00. Interestingly, it was their comments as to their satisfaction, or lack of it, with their purchase, that got me thinking. Here are some of them.....
A) I paid 0.00, not because I don't value the producers or wish to encourage the distribution method, but because of the band's process. The band didn't inform digital download customers that the audio would arrive at 160kbps until after many of the orders were placed. 160kbps is also unnecessarily low, meaning that people who want something approximating the actual sound material will need to buy the CD anyway, and wait until 2008 to do so unless they purchase the wildly expensive discbox. The combined marketing machinations here, clearly intended to produce hype and generate CD sales, ultimately result in the opposite of what you want from this kind of experiment. I'm planning to buy the CD, since the downloaded version will sound bad on everything but my laptop's internal speakers. So I paid nothing for the download, which I view as essentially a promo. Had the band not manipulated customers in such a disappointingly familiar fashion I would have paid a fair price for the low-quality download, as I do on the occasions I use iTunes or emusic. But given the circumstances, I didn't want to encourage this willingness to accept low-quality audio, and I didn't want to help cement an already strong association between innovative distribution models and compromised information density.
B) I'm going to have to go with A on this one. I personally had never listened to Radiohead before and when I heard about this, I placed my $0.00 order so that I could listen and see if I liked it. It is worth noting that I was willing to spend $2 or $3 just to download the albumn for previewing purposes, however, the website was shady in appearance at best. It was hard to tell if the website was legit (aside from the millions of blog posts in m RSS reader.) While I told myself that I would come back and buy the album for real if I did like it, I doubt this would have ever materialized. (Ironically) luckily for Radiohead, I didn't like the album so they didn't lose anything more than the cost of bandwidth because of me. Lastly, I would argue that the money spent in bandwidth on cases like myself are probably within reasonable limits of advertising. If I had liked the album, I would not hesitate to buy other albums and see them in concert.
C) I did some further analysis on this using Hitwise Internet usage data here: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2007/10/radiohead_freakonomics_and_fre_1.html
The main finding was that the people downloading the album from Radiohead's site are not the same sort of people who download from stuff for free from the file sharing sites. This could mean one of two things for Radiohead - either they've managed to tap into the market of people who are willing to pay for the content and the honour systmem will see them good; or they've just started giving their music away for free to the very people that are usually prepared to pay for it. Hopefully Radiohead will release some data from this experiment and we'll see which is true!
Robin Goad
So, there are 3 noteworthy comments posted..... and here is an update from Chris, regarding the actual outcome to date....
"the early reports are in from the band and external sources. Estimates put the average price paid at $5-$8, which largely agrees with the informal survey here. Approximately 1.2 million people downloaded the album from the site and at least another 500,000 got it for free from BitTorrent.
The PR value of the excercise: priceless"
And this, from over at the 'NextGreatThing' blog:
1) When an estimated 1.2 millions fans downloaded the CD on its release date, many had never heard the album’s music before—it wasn’t on the radio or leaked on the web. And many paid for it anyway.
2) The band released the music on its own, giving it direct access over the estimated $6-10 million it generated on day one. With a record label, the band would have needed to sell 10 times more albums
to reach that same profit.
3) While some fans voiced outrage over the download’s reduced quality (not as good as a CD, but better than iTunes) and statements by management that the digital release was only a promotion for the physical CD, a reported 700,000 orders have already been placed for the extremely pricy $81 special edition “discbox” debuting in December.
4) The 10-song digital release is a mere 43 minutes, significantly less than the average CD—meaning the band is producing less material but still marketing it as a full album. The band is actually adding 8 more songs in the “discbox” edition, which means more fans will be compelled to buy the “discbox” later on.
5) In November, the band will start planning an old-fashioned physical CD release in stores, which it still expects to do well despite the digital offering. As manager Bryce Edge told the U.K.’s Music Week, “If we didn’t believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn’t do what we are doing.”
Radiohead is also selling a physical boxed set, which contains the new album on CD and on two 12" heavyweight vinyl records, along with a second enhanced CD containing more new songs, digital photographs and artwork. The set also includes lyric booklets and all are encased in a hardback book and slipcase
COST: $80.00 U.S. - just wondering if you get a credit for the crappy download?.... probably not :-(
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