And those British Pounds are like real money and stuff. As everybody who has internet access knows, Radiohead recently released their latest album In Rainbows as a digital download via their own website, allowing buyers to name their own price. While the band themselves still aren’t talking about how many people downloaded the album (or how much they paid), a consumer research firm did a study and found that a large majority paid, well, zip:
Some 62 percent of the people who downloaded “In Rainbows” in a four- week period last month opted not to pay the British alt-rockers a cent. But the remaining 38 percent voluntarily paid an average of $6, according to the study by comScore Inc. …The results of the study were drawn from data gathered from a few hundred people who are part of comScore’s database of 2 million computer users worldwide. The firm, which has permission to monitor the computer users’ online behavior, did not provide a margin of error for the study’s results.
Interestingly, the percentage of American fans who paid at all was slightly higher than the non-U.S. average (40% to 36%), and amusingly, the average amount paid by people who did pay was way higher in the U.S., $8.05 compared to $4.64 outside the U.S. I’m going to take a guess the exchange rate came into play there: I bet there were quite a few fans like myself whose casual entering of a number that seemed like a nice compromise—say, £5—were in for a bit of a shock when their credit card bill came back saying that turned out to be $10.43. Even those of us with impending European tours who are keeping their eye on the now-so-low-it’s-barely-visible dollar (€1.46 today!!) (er, wait, I mean, €1 is $1.46 today. See this is part of the problem right here, Americans can’t do math) succumbed to mathematical habit; I mean, paying somebody 3 of anything for an album just seems mean, even though £3 is like $6.25, which isn’t bad for ten 160kbps mp3s from a band who doesn’t need the money. Ah well, consider it my contribution towards the downfall of the record industry.
