Pulling a Radiohead…
KeithHandy posted in Business, Old skool, Your Soul on October 11th, 2007
For those of you that either link/bookmark straight to the blog, or use an RSS reader (and therefore skip the news page that keithhandy.com directs people to), you can now download and listen to Leave of Absence 2 in its entirety in 224 kbps mp3 format before deciding to purchase it! Nicely packaged CDs will continue to be available on lulu.com at a reasonable price if, like many people (myself included), you like physical objects.
I’ll soon write a more extensive post/page revealing more than you ever wanted to know about every single click, bang, and whirl on Leave of Absence 2.
Send some thanks to my friend Brooke for encouraging me to enter the twenty-first century. And be sure to check back for more music to come.
October 12th, 2007 at 7:11 am
It’s good you’re getting this Radiohead-inspired laissez-faire approach to money making out of your system soon. I was listening to an economist talk about this on NPR (On the Media) and he thinks that this will work once or twice, but that the public will stop feeling obligated to pay more than a buck (if anything) fairly quickly. Also, the Radiohead system has a built-in minimum of $1 dollar (hidden in the fine print), so you have to give at least that, which was about half of what they made per record sale when they were with a label.
But, that is not to be all down on this idea. I think it’s cool as shit. I just wanted to be like, “Hey everybody, I listen to NPR.” :-)
October 12th, 2007 at 7:35 am
If my primary goal were to make money, I would have given up on music a long time ago. :)
October 12th, 2007 at 8:59 am
By the way, it’s funny how the mere act of putting music out today is guaranteed to be controversial, no matter which route you take. Fact is, nobody really has “the answer” right now. But selling copies of a fixed piece of easily-reproducible art is going to raise a lot of questions. DRM is extremely unpopular, and rightly so, so we already almost have to rely on the honor system to some degree, even when we initially charge a fixed price or only sell physical media.
I’d like to hear that particular economist’s explanation, but it’s worth mentioning that nobody has to tip their wait staff at restaurants, yet most people do; so it largely boils down to what does or doesn’t wind up becoming a cultural norm over the long haul. At least the waiter/waitress is physically there in front of the customer, interacting in a human way, and maybe that will turn out to be the missing ingredient in the online tipping model; not just for music, but for anything online (or otherwise “distanced” from the customer) that takes or asks for donations.
I don’t think I found the exact interview you were talking about, but I found this:
http://www.kuow.org/defaultProgram.asp?ID=13625
October 12th, 2007 at 9:14 am
Even though that link was probably not the exact show you heard, the caller at 39:45 has an excellent point — if you give “meaning” to the various donation levels, giving the customer a better idea of what costs they’d be covering at each level, they will be less confused about what amount to pay.
I sort of did this with the text file included with the download, assigning particular “meanings” to $5.00 and $10.00 donations.
October 13th, 2007 at 7:07 am
That wasn’t the interview I heard, but here it is:
From On the Media.
Also, I like your comment about making it have meaning, and the talk about wait staff… this is all very intriguing to me.
Cheers,
-JCE
October 13th, 2007 at 7:11 am
Oh. I guess it won’t let me embed the audio, so here’s a link.