Kudos to Radiohead for choosing to offer their new CD as a download online for whatever price you want to pay. Thats right, when the album becomes available on 10/10/07 you can go to inrainbows.com and pay whatever you want to purchase the download. Of course you may have to pay a transaction fee and we don’t know what that will be.
If you want a CD, that will be sold at a fixed price most likely in December.
So is this a good idea or bad idea? I think its a great idea for these reasons:
1. Radiohead is no longer affiliated with a record company and therefore has to do all their own marketing-what a great way to get press with a pay your own price promo.
2. Radiohead is not exactly at the top of the charts and would like to sell more albums-this is a great way to rekindle old listeners and get new listeners to try Radiohead-don’t forget if I buy this one for $1 and really like their music then I have to pay full price for everything else.
3. If this album is successful and they introduce another album shortly thereafter the increase in sales from this album’s free trial could effect a larger sales of all future Radiohead CDs.
Finally the best part of this is that we can now see what Radiohead is really worth. This could be inspiring for the group or not so inspiring.