KEY POINTS:
After trying unsuccessfully a couple of times last week to download Radiohead's new album In Rainbows from the band's website, I was successful in getting hold of it over the weekend. What a great way to do business.
Radiohead had decided to circumvent the traditional music distribution model with the album, initially offering it for sale on its website instead. But that alone wouldn't have been too novel.
Instead, Radiohead let its fans decide how much they should pay for the album - if they wanted to pay nothing they could. The website was swamped with people trying to download the album, rendering it inoperable for a period.
I paid the equivalent of $10.49 for In Rainbows, what I consider to be a fair price given the music has no associated artwork or physical media and is encoded at 160Kbps (kilobits per second) - not as good as CD quality.
As people set about punching information into the menus on the Radiohead purchase screen, it seems many of them were thinking exactly the same thing as me - just how much is Radiohead worth? That's obviously a deeply subjective question. How much would you have paid?
If you could chart the band as you would a share on the stock market, their creative peak would have been the period of the release of OK Computer ten years ago, with a steady decline thereafter.
I think I paid somewhere in the range of $25 - $30 for that album on CD at the time. In Rainbows is good but nowhere near as good as OK Computer.
To put it in terms of a band I know very well, and one Radiohead is often compared to, In Rainbows is like the equivalent of Pink Floyd's 1977 album Animals which was a strong outing but slightly disappointing given the band had in the previous few years before produced Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.
So $10.49 feels about the right price for In Rainbows. It looks like the majority of downloaders have come to a similar conclusion with reports that the bulk of downloads have been in the US$5-8 range.
Apart from the congestion that rendered the site inoperable just after release, downloading the music was a breeze, uncannily similar in fact to downloading an album from an illegal filesharing website.
It downloaded quickly - at an average of 60Kbps, came as a zipped RAR file, with no DRM built into it. The album was in my iTunes library and playing within 15 minutes of me punching in my credit card details.
Hopefully the model catches on and other artists have the courage to take the release path Radiohead has. It's a sign of the respect the band commands and the quality of its music that the majority of people appear to have paid reasonable prices.
