Make like Radiohead with ‘In Rainbows’ and have your fans pay whatever they like for your music
You can’t argue that when Radiohead announced the release of ‘In Rainbows’ a matter of days after it had been completed and just days before it was made available and announced that fans would be able to get the mp3 download for whatever they wanted to pay, they sent shockwaves right through the recorded music part of the industry.
It was groundbreaking in two ways – obviously the choosable pricing was a first, and headline grabbing, but time will perhaps show that the fast turnaround from album completion to being made available to fans might yet be the bigger revelation. The band made much of it at the time – wanting to be able to get their music to fans as soon as they had created it rather than going through a 6 to 12 month build up in an old school label approach before release.
Nonetheless, the pricing initiative turned out to be very profitable for the band, but, of course, they were already a world class act with a massive and rabid fanbase – would that approach work for you?
Well, now there’s a new service that will allow you to find out – anjuno.
If you know how the Radiohead release worked, then you pretty much know how anjuno works.
It’s free to join and anjuno then takes a percentage of any income from sales of downloads. You upload your stuff (I say stuff, because the system works for music or ebooks – so how about doing a tab book or lyric book for your fans at the same time?) and then set the system to accept payment at a level that a fan wants to pay – including free.
It’s brand new, and who knows how this is going to work for new artists. Personally, I think it’s a great idea and I’d follow the Radiohead model and use anjuno for an early release blitz followed up by a physical release (with superior packaging or otherwise of collectable value) and continued availability on itunes etc.
Of course, you’re going to get some people going for the free option, but as the Radiohead release showed, faith in human nature will pay off and a record will find a natural price level if its good enough!
What do you think – do you like the idea? Let us know.
June 16th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
I don’t know if Radiohead using self-determined pricing was all that groundbreaking. It was just the first time such a high profile band did it. Issa and The Endless have been doing it for a while now:
http://www.issalight.com
http://www.theendlessband.com/store
I especially like their stores because you get to see that people who are opting to pay often pay a higher amount per song than $.99 because they want to support the artist. It’s pretty interesting.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:07 am
It’s certainly brand new, but I’m not convinced that it’s solving a problem. Bandcamp already gives bands the technology to sell downloads with flexible voluntary pricing as part of their own website. And they don’t take a commission.
I’d say it’s more important to show bands how to do this stuff themselves (easily) than to tie them in to another platform that’s skimming %s off low-dollar purchases.
But hey, it’s not all bad. The community of people who are switched on to new models of music sales might turn out to be a good thing.
June 17th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Interesting site, will look into it some more.
Just as a point of interest, Radiohead’s use of the ‘choose your own price’ model was NOT the first, I know of at least one artist that was doing it for a while before them: Canada’s Jane Sibbery, via her indie label Sheeba Records. The store now seems to be closed but I remember being impressed with the concept and then a couple of years later when Radiohead did it, obviously on a much larger scale, remembering that I’d seen it before. Sheeba even had a little graph section that showed what people chose to pay – you could get it for free, as a ‘gift from the artist’, or pay whatever you wanted. There was a suggested price, and it’s a measure of her adoring fanbase that quite a few people chose to pay more.
Also, Magnatune.com is an online record company based around the same concept and have been doing it for some years as well. They now have a subscription model but it’s still pay-what-you-want, albeit starting at $10 a month. You can still get one-offs as well, but again there’s a minimum (and, oddly, a maximum!)…
Generally it seems clear that the price of recorded music is trending towards free and the people that are going to continue to do well are those that manage to find ancillary revenue streams that are driven by the music, rather than selling it per se. This transition will take time but it’s probably worth being on the front edge of it rather than left behind…
June 17th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Can’t argue with these comments – I should clearly have said ‘first major artist’ to use the model – my bad!