Radiohead's Marketing Ploy Not A Stunt; Just Good Business
from the confused-people dept
Soon after Radiohead announced its plans to offer name-your-own-price downloads, the band's manager said in an interview with the Financial Times that they were doing so in order to boost CD sales. For some odd reason, this statement has apparently pissed off a bunch of people who keep submitting the FT article over and over again for weeks to say that Radiohead's decision is now suspect. However, that doesn't make any sense. As we said when Radiohead first made the announcement, it was clear from the beginning that they were trying to give them reasons to buy the CD. It wasn't a bait and switch situation at all, as they were quite upfront about it. It also isn't a bad thing. It shows the band is doing exactly what the economics suggests it should be doing: using the infinite goods (the music) to help make the scarce goods (CDs) more valuable. The band never said you had to buy the CD. It just said that you can pay what you want (including nothing at all) while also making it clear that the CD was going to be a lot more valuable to own. That seems like a smart business move. About the only mistake in there seems to be that the band accidentally made people think that it was somehow against selling CDs, even though it was clear from the beginning that the band still wanted to sell a CD version and make it worth owning.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: business models, marketing, music, radiohead
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Thank you
One request: can we all now start talking about how amazing the actual music?
Thanks!
Donald
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Werd!
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Yes
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I think its a great idea
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Re: #5
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Re: Re: #5
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The Music Is Amazing + Radiohead management
Come on...
Anyways, the record is definitely KILLING! Anyone that was a little turned off by the last album should check out "In Rainbows"...it's easy to swallow
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Then when I saw people getting angry I though "Man, people are idiots too."
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Re: Gunnar
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Great CD!
Way to go Radiohead!
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re: #4
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Re: re: #4
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Re:
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& they have made a packet
All up already they have made over $10mill & apparently if they had done this via the traditional record label distribution then they would have had to sell 10 times the volume to make the same amount of money.
I thought that according the RIAA the only way for artists to profit was through DRM?
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Sorry, have to disagree
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Re: Sorry, have to disagree
I'm sorry, you're absolutely wrong on this. At the same time they announced the download program, they announced the CD boxset offering... They were both available on the website.
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RE: Sorry, have to disagree
But had I known the CD would be available in a month or so and would have additional tracks, I wouldn't have paid full-cd price for the download when I'll have to do it again in a little while for the additional tracks.
See this article for the quote: "Radiohead will release the album on CD in January, and its managers hinted that the physical version might contain more material."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0a9c779a-7797-11dc-9de8-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
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