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COLOUR OF MONEY Should fans pay for Radiohead’s In Rainbows?

What isn’t old news for music fans, however, is the sudden departure from traditional music distribution that British band Radiohead undertook earlier this month. It let consumers decide how much they would like to pay for a digital copy of the band’s latest album “In Rainbows”. The album has simply been put up for download at www.inrainbows.com, and every user visiting the site can choose to pay whatever he or she feels the digital album is worth. Users even have the option of paying nothing at all for the album too.

This isn’t the first time such a move’s been adopted. What has made this story so exciting is that this time around it involves no lesser a figure than Radiohead. That such a major band has taken this step is interesting in light of the rhetoric of the industry that piracy is killing music, says Lawrence Liang, a researcher on intellectual property for the Alternative Law Forum. “The other aspect is the ethical dimension. This idea acts on the premise that there can be a relationship of trust between musician and fans.”

At first glance, such a system seems rigged for failure. After all, one wonders, how does the model become viable if only 10 per cent of the consumers pay for the music? But consider the skyrocketing levels of what users call “free downloads” and the industry calls “piracy”. “Nobody makes any serious money selling CDs,” points out Bruce Lee Mani, lead guitarist and vocalist of Thermal and a Quarter (TAAQ). “If you sell one CD today, tomorrow 100 guys will have the album, no matter what kind of copy protection or digital rights management you attempt. What hasn’t changed and still sells at a premium is the live experience.”

That perspective is exemplified in TAAQ’s own experience when it made its third album available for free download on its website. The band immediately received worldwide attention, including a nine-minute interview spot on National Public Radio. “It gave us so much credibility. And the U.S. market opened up for us. It couldn’t have happened even with an Indian record label because they would never have had the distribution reach.”

Audience goodwill

Vijay Nair, Founding Director of Counter Culture Records, says this move will also earn bands much more in terms of audience goodwill. “From the fan relationship perspective, this is a great thing to do. Like when Pearl Jam released their own low-priced recordings of their live gigs instead of leaving fans to pay inflated prices for rare bootlegs.”

Then there is also the point that more people than not are willing to pay their share. Radiohead’s representatives say more people have been willing to pay a median price for the album.

This, says Lawrence, also coincides with other experiences, such as of a website called Magnatune, which also lets individual home users pick their own price plan for albums they download. “The website offers a voluntary payment scheme ranging from three to 20 dollars and also tells consumers that 50 per cent goes to the artiste. And the site has found that people have been willing to pay at a higher-than-median rate.”

Of course, this doesn’t automatically mean the end of the record label, say industry observers. Says Bruce, labels would probably migrate more towards the role of booking and promotion agents, than traditional music distributors.

Representatives of some of the larger record labels are adopting a wait-and-watch policy. T. Suresh, General Manager of EMI India, for instance, argues that music pricing in India is already affordable and that Radiohead’s model may not guarantee similar successes here. “I don’t see people paying enough for the musicians to earn a decent living. Consumer behaviour varies, and you can’t take one case of Radiohead as testament to the model’s viability.”

While the jury is out on this one, take the time to check out Radiohead’s “In Rainbows”, download it. And remember to pay, or not.

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