Radiohead have released more details about the sales of last album 'In Rainbows', and while they are still rather vague in parts, most media seem to think the stats, revealed at Icelandic music business conference You Are In Control, prove the whole venture was a jolly big success, and who am I to say otherwise?
The sales figures for 'In Rainbows' are interesting, of course, because it was the album Radiohead made available for download months before its physical release on a 'pay what you want' basis. With the band having not long left their previous label EMI, somewhat acrimoniously, the promotion led to much 'is this the future of the music industry?' and 'surely now the record companies are doomed?' style commentary.
Certainly the pay what you want promo was a genius bit of 'right place, right time, right band' marketing - securing Thom Yorke et al buckets of mainstream press coverage, all of which helped hype the accompanying box set release, the subsequent CD release and even the conventional digital release via iTunes.
And while some casual Radiohead fans probably chose to pay nothing for the new long player - which they might otherwise have bought - others may have been prompted to buy the CD release because of the hype surrounding the original digital giveaway. Plus, without the overheads of a major record company and with the hype surrounding the giveaway reducing marketing costs, the band and their business partners were always going to go into profit on this release a lot quicker. And, of course, all the hype helped promote the band's then upcoming tour.
So job done, but there has still been much speculation as to how well the download promotion actually did, what the average fan chose to pay for the album, and what impact the giveaway had on the subsequent physical release. Unlike Trent Reznor, who has been brutally honest about the pay what you want releases he's been involved in, Radiohead have been very quiet on how the 'In Rainbows' promotion really went.
We still don't know what the average fan chose to pay for the free download, but the band's publicist has said 'In Rainbows' was definitely a success for the band in terms of both reach and income, revealing that 3 million units of the album have been sold to date, including downloads, that 100,000 deluxe box sets were sold, and that 30,000 copies of the album were even sold by iTunes. He added that the band had made more money from 'In Rainbows' than from 2003's EMI released 'Hail To The Thief' before it had even been released on CD. Of course that might tell us more about how little 'Hail To The Thief' earned the band rather than how much 'In Rainbows' brought in, but it's an interesting statistic nevertheless.