So, Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows is coming out soon, and the band is offering the digital download from their website for as much as you want to pay to download it. I’m loving this idea. I download a lot of my music off of Oink, and there have been many times where I’ve said to myself ‘I wish I could send this artist $5′ because I enjoy the album, but I don’t want to pay for the CD because in the end, the artist would only be seeing a fraction of the money. Yes, I know, it’s bad. But with a CD costing upwards of $10-15, having 90+% of the money go to the record companies, entities which I am certainly no fan of, makes it tough to do. So, I want to reward artists for their fantastic work, but paying $15 for something I already have in my posession (their music) with a fraction of the money going to them just doesn’t seem like the best way to do it.
There was a time when I wanted to set up a website that would be sort of a middleman between music fans and artists. You say how much money you want to send to a band, we’d make sure it got to them. That way, if you downloaded an album or copied a CD from a friend, you could show your appreciation directly. Alas, the logistics of such an operation proved to be a barrier and I imagine I would probably get beat up by Record Industry thugs. 
So, new Radiohead album. I’m going to buy it for 5 pounds. If you’re going to download it, how much will you be paying?
2 Comments for How much are you going to pay? :)
Djthrussticles | October 5, 2007 at 11:12 am
Jordie | October 6, 2007 at 9:24 am
I’d be more enthused if this were for a smaller band. It’s not exactly like Radiohead needs the money. Having said that I shall participate because I want to demonstrate that their proposed system works. Also I still feel bad for boycotting Amnisiac because is had digital right protection.
I still buy a lot of albums and then end up encoding them all. It’d be nice to pay a little less, know it’s going directly to the artist, and have the pain of encoding removed. The only thing I’d miss is “the album experience” when listening.
Around $10 is what I’d expect to pay for an album