Radiohead - In Rainbows
Radiohead at present sell their new album "In Rainbows" exclusively through their website. You can define your own price for the download album, starting from as low as £0.45 - which is the minimum credit card fee. The Album is available for download or a disc set including vinyl, cd and download, - for which the cost is set at a minimum of £40.- (CHFr. 97). Even tough the disc set only gets shipped only on december 3rd - it is made to order - the download link gets presented to you immediately if you buy the disc set.
I managed to buy the download on the release day, after a few attempts, -guess because their servers couldn't quite handle the demand. It's another beautiful Radiohead album and the artwork for the discs looks great, unfortunately the download doesn't include cover artwork.
We were discussing how much people might pay for a download and if Radiohead would make as much money from this like they would if released through a major label and regular channels... hard to say, their huge fan base will probably pay a decent amount - and with all proceeds going straight to the artists (no distribution cost etc.) this may even work out. I paid £ 5 for the download AND ordered the disc set, -because for some reason I had understood even the download would only be available in december if ordered with the box set... Ah well, since the 160 kbps MP3's are without DRM, I passed on one of the albums ;)
