MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Radiohead confirm the death of the music industry (Industry)

In this Guardian article from 2007 Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' album is discussed as either the future of music marketing or a rich rock star's indulgence due to the bands' 'pay what you like' downloading pricing experiment.

What Radiohead did was very simple. Free of their major label, they simply announced In Rainbows 10 days before its release and let the public decide what – if anything – they would pay to download it. Cue uproar. Depending on who you asked, this was either the future of music marketing or a rich rock star's indulgence.

And cleaning up in the process – surveys suggested the average fan paid £2.46 for In Rainbows, which went directly to the band. When they did release the album on CD, it went to No 1 anyway.

Even if no star ever tries anything like In Rainbows' release again, it's still a significant moment. The price-it-yourself approach grabbed the headlines, but it always went hand-in-hand with other initiatives. For a start, Radiohead announced the download version of In Rainbows simultaneously with a deluxe physical package, the £40 "discbox" edition, and made as much on this alone as their entire previous album had made. For reissues, this multi-tier release is now common practice, with super-premium versions of old records designed to delight – or exploit – an act's most passionate fans.

Perhaps the most significant thing about In Rainbows, though, was how skilfully it turned the album into an event. Ten days turned out to be just long enough to get people primed and eager, but not for any actual material to leak. The result was the unexpected return of something people only now realised they missed. Just 10 years ago, release dates were the music fan's red-letter day – associated with first-play rituals, nervous walks home from the record shop, enthused discussions with fellow disciples. By the time of In Rainbows, all that was replaced for many by a "has it leaked?" mentality stretching over the weeks or months before. With In Rainbows, Radiohead wrested control of their output from the record companies, but their unspoken masterstroke was to wrest some control back from their listeners too.