Name your price music downloads: Opinions?

[kleydj13]

I first ran into this with Radiohead's In Rainbows album. I'd never listed to them before, I paid a wopping $0 for one of the best albums I've ever owned. From there I've cultivated a large RH catalog and joyfully paid full price for each album I've since bought.

From a music perspective the Name your own price concept allowed me to discover a new band that I now love, and may not have discovered without it.

From a business perspective Radiohead has made close to $100 more from my pocket, each penny I've been happy to give to them as their music is worth the $ to me.

Also as the days of the compact disc are diminishing in favor of iTunes and lots of controversy swirls around illegal downloading, I find this to be a refreshing alternative for distributing music in the digital age. I also have a lot of respect for an artist who is willing to do it.

What are your thoughts?

I'm also interested to hear from those who are closer to the artist's perspective. Maybe some statistics or experiences with how it impacts their ability to make money as artists.

[teleharmonium]

I think once an artist gets to the point where they have earned tens of millions of dollars from their recordings, benefiting from large corporate advertising budgets along the way, it can make sense for them to spend a considerable sum on a new recording and then basically put it out with a tip jar for payment. Their audience is so large that the risk is still manageable, and they could keep going even if the quarter or half million dollars or whatever to make the album was a total loss.

It would not be reasonable for those living hand to mouth, to use the same strategy. If they record for real cheap, I could see it. But they don't have the resources nor the built in audience, so it's really not comparable.

You have to remember that the example you chose is the extreme of the music business where very few musicians are and the rest want to be. For most musicians that are trying to gain a following doing their own music, they have been investing time and money for years with little or no returns. So whether you pay nothing or $15, it's still in the red to the artist, the only question is how much.

It kind of gets old, people telling you that not paying you now will lead to a bigger payday later. I can't predict the future, but IMO as long as you're depending on the honor system or a tip jar for your rent, you better have a backup plan, and take it when a grain of salt when you are told that giving your work away (that you already had to pay into) is an "opportunity".

[sws1]

Not sure you'd get a real answer. I'd LOVE to hear whether RH thought their idea worked. But I'm sure they won't tell you.

Did it pay for the cost of recording? Prob not. Maybe
Did it get them alot of press? Absolutely
Did they get alot of people to hear their music, like it, and then buy tickets on tour? Absolutely.
Did it cement them at the forefront of the new music biz model? Yes, although this may only have a strategic payoff.

[kleydj13]

Not sure you'd get a real answer. I'd LOVE to hear whether RH thought their idea worked. But I'm sure they won't tell you.

Did it pay for the cost of recording? Prob not. Maybe
Did it get them alot of press? Absolutely
Did they get alot of people to hear their music, like it, and then buy tickets on tour? Absolutely.
Did it cement them at the forefront of the new music biz model? Yes, although this may only have a strategic payoff.

I too wonder what RH would say about it in hindsight. I'd also be curious to know of other bands that have done this.

[mojocaster.com]

It's like when Doom came out, isn't it? :)

[PedalFreak]

Not sure you'd get a real answer. I'd LOVE to hear whether RH thought their idea worked. But I'm sure they won't tell you.

Did it pay for the cost of recording? Prob not. Maybe
Did it get them alot of press? Absolutely
Did they get alot of people to hear their music, like it, and then buy tickets on tour? Absolutely.
Did it cement them at the forefront of the new music biz model? Yes, although this may only have a strategic payoff.

I know they sold 1.2million copies the first week. Not sure what the average price was. Thought I heard at one time, but can't remember. They also had 500,000 copies still illegally downloaded that same week, even though you could have gotten it from free from them.

[aliensporebomb]

Thinking.

I've got my own music up on iTunes ($9.99) and I have no flexibility to do that with the CD there. I couldn't do a black friday sale nor could I go "this day only, it's a stinking dollar!".

--

But I have my ambient space guitar music over at bandcamp and I did something crazy
for that on black friday: I had my short projects priced at $2 and my long projects $4.

Normally the long projects were $9.99 and the short ones were $5.

It's set up so that if you want to pay more you can.

I don't know how successful or experimental it was but I did have a few sales that I might not have otherwise gotten.

But I didn't exactly advertise it either. Maybe next year or on my birthday I'll drop the prices to ridiculously low levels for a few hours.

--

In the case of Radiohead: what it might have lost in cash money it made up many dividends in GOODWILL as the band appeared to be the kind that the fans will follow thru thick and thin because of doing something like that.

So they might have lost money on this release but over the next few if they keep up their level of quality people will just keep buying their music.

And why not?

[Lance]

They also had 500,000 copies still illegally downloaded that same week, even though you could have gotten it from free from them.

WTF?! Creatures of habit, I guess?

[teleharmonium]

In the case of Radiohead: what it might have lost in cash money it made up many dividends in GOODWILL as the band appeared to be the kind that the fans will follow thru thick and thin because of doing something like that.

So they might have lost money on this release but over the next few if they keep up their level of quality people will just keep buying their music.

And why not?

It's impossible to know, really.

It's not like their previous several releases didn't sell in very large numbers. We have no particular reason to assume that the album in question would have done better or worse with more conventional marketing, nor to assume that whatever future albums they put out will have anything to do with that one in terms of the reasons for sales performance.

For all of these reasons, they make a lousy poster child for pay as you like downloads, or at least, not an example that is in any sense transferable to bands that were not already huge before giving it a try.

[tiktok]

I thought that RH made a lot of money off the deluxe version they offered--two LP's, a CD, a book, a nice box, plus immediate downloads on zero hour. That was around $100, and that's how I got it.

[oh.my]

I like name your price downloads. It's the honor system, and I like being trusted.

What I DON'T like is downloads with a "minimum price." You've seen them: $1 "or more." That's the same as a fixed price, in my book -- no, it's WORSE than a simple fixed price. It's INSULTING, and we're back to the artist not trusting the audience. I walk away, every time.

[ccpa]

I want a cd. I would think that people like me could care less about paying for the DL. It's a free listening party to make a decision to purchase the cd. Others may prefer the download and this is their custom way to listen to music. I'd guess $4 - $5 was the average.

But then more people come to concerts and enjoy your music. Difficult to gauge success bc there are too many other factors involved.

[kleydj13]

I suppose I can understand how it would awfully tough for many bands who aren't on the same level as RH to pull this off from a financial level. If you need the money you probably aren't going to be too thrilled with the prospect of giving your music away for free.

[Aaron Smith]

People are naming their own price every day- and that price is "free", i.e. stolen. If there were enforceable consequences for outright theft, then I could see "name your price" being a viable concept.