@mettleh3d: I agree that there is a difference between 128k vs. 160k vs. 320k .... as you mentioned, the equipment you listen to it is the determining factor of noticing the difference. And iPod with the headphones that come with it, 99% of the people listening won't be able to tell the difference between the different bit rates.

As for Radiohead, I really don't think the survey should have deemed anyone "cheap". Radiohead was the one who wanted the fans to decide what they wanted to pay for the album. I paid £7.50 for the album (yeah, a bit more than what I would pay for a normal CD in the stores) and wanted to send the message that I liked this new model of getting music to the fans.

Having said that, I think there will be multiple methods of this direct distribution and not a single one of them will be the best option. Trent and Co. have a good option with the different bit rates, based on free/paid.

The thing I hope that comes out of all this is to have the RIAA thinking they need to finally embrace this new model, instead of fearing it.

chillywilly

@yaesumofo: I totally agree with you except for this:

"I like the you get what you pay for model. you pay a low price and get low bit rate mps. Pay more and you get better quality. all the way up to .wav or FLAC files."

It doesn't cost anyone any more or less to have these files encoded in any/all formats. I think all the formats should be a flat rate.

johnnyrandom

Keep in mind that Radiohead is also selling a BOXED version of the Record. this will include Vinyl, the CD as well as a CD with more MUSIC all for the low low price of 100 Pounds I believe.

I doubt they will sell many of those.

I like the you get what you pay for model. you pay a low price and get low bit rate mps. Pay more and you get better quality. all the way up to .wav or FLAC files. As somebody who always copies his music at the highest possible quality level I guess I will pay more.

Another thing to remember was that the MP3 format was introduced at a time when memory was premium priced. flash based players with 128 meg or memory were huge and expensive. the idea was to be able to put as much music on those little flash chips as possible.
Now we have IPODS and other devices with 16 GIG of Flash space enough for over 16 Cd's of UNCOMPRESSED music and 160 gig of disk space enough room for a hell of a lot of HIGH QUALITY "ripped" music.
Unheard of then.
IMHO MP3's are crap. I hate them because they sound like crap. and I have trashing all of my old rips. I am re placing everything as lossless flies since space is no longer the limiting factor.

I beleive that What Radiohead has done has shown is a glimpse of the future. I love the idea of removing the middleman and dealing directly with the BAND and or artist. This is how it should be. We will be seeing a whole bunch more direct marketing from artists and Bands directly to US

Yaesumofo

yaesumofo

I own a decent pair of $100 shures, and playing 128kb vs. 192 or 256 I hear a noticeable gain in quality. 128 sounds flat and slightly muffled. With 320 kbps however, I'm not as anal to discovering the difference between it and 192. + they take up far too much space on my 1st gen ipod nano, I'm already deleting past favorites to make room for new tracks.

As a sidenote, I used the earphones on a standard CD player I've ignored since the rise of mp3 players; and well, CDs are obviously still untouchable. 320 vs CD => CDs ftw.

And way to go for NIN. Very brave and very smart, hope it goes well for them as well as the rest of the artists who follow.

mettleh3d

That makes the Saul Williams price of five bucks or nothing a hit... right?
(And for five bucks you get a quality encoding... not 128kbps).

whiskey

@Steve19970: Yeah, 128k sucks. If you truly want to hear some horrendous audio, check out some flash sites. Some flash designers compress stuff down to 48 kbps mono! I'd rather wait a few more seconds for the audio to load than have it sound that crappy. Mp3 is going to go extinct someday, and not a day too soon. AAC already kicks mp3's ass. Compressed audio doesn't have to have farty bass lines, mushy cymbals and fwappy snare drums full of hideous artifacts.

johnnyrandom

@Skeptical_Geezer: A couple of years ago I did a side by side comparison of a CD burned from a 128 kbps MP3 and the original, and the difference was startling, even on a rock CD. The MP3 was much more hollow sounding...I didn't know what I had been missing. I've burned at 192 kbps since then (I figured it was a happy medium between HDD hungry 256 and crappy 128).

Steve19970

@Padriac: Very true. The mp3s are stereo 44.1k 160 kbps.

johnnyrandom

In Rainbows was at 160kbps. I actually ended up paying $10, but my primary reason was that I never paid for OK Computer, which I love.

UofITom

So what *was* the bitrate of the Radiohead album (the article doesn't say). I can see not wanting to pay a lot for a highly compressed version, but unless it's sub 192 kbps mp3 it's still worth *something*.

I know the lossless Nazis will never be satisfied, but 99.99999% of listeners will never be able to tell the difference between lossless and 256 kbps mp3/aac.

Padriac

Well, I paid 20£ for the Radiohead album. I did it out of principle, really. They are incredibly talented and I felt like that was a fair price considering the musicality involved (not the mp3 quality). I think if this model is to be the future, you should be able to choose whatever file format or encoding process that you want.

I downloaded the Saul Williams album and was glad I didn't pay $5 since I didn't like the album: I trashed it within the hour. If I did like it, I would have bought the $5 version.

Since humans are greedy bastards by nature (as most organisms are) I'm not surprised if people were tight wads about buying the Radiohead album. By this, I mean people who easily could have paid more for something good, yet still didn't so they could blow their money on something stupid....like a set of Pear Cables.

johnnyrandom

I feel that it's worth adding my voice to the choir of people who paid nothing for 'In Rainbows' because of the low bitrate MP3s. Once Radiohead offers a high quality MP3 or the CD is released (outside of that silly $80 collectors edition), I will gladly pay for it.

And, in case you were wondering, I did happily pay $5 for 'Niggy Tardust.' The transaction was great.

I've got money and I want my favorite artists to have it. Give me what I want and it's yours.

neuracnu

> Try $0.25. Major label artists really don't earn jack shit from CD sales. You get more from merch, touring, and such.

thats not true.. the record company gives you money.. then you pay them back based on cd sales.. after you pay them back you get more % of the cd sale. it also greatly depends on the artist. radiohead would had made a lot more than $.25 per album.

tgwaste

@rainfever: I'm not sure how you could have made that assumption considering it was fairly clear this is not a NIN album by what was posted on his website.

fallenturtle

I was hoping that Saul Williams would be an interesting test-case, but I think that Reznor's heavy involvement means that the results will be even less conclusive than In Rainbows. for what it's worth I paid the $5 for the 320kps version of Niggy. S'OK. I've spent more watching some very bad bands in the East Village, and i like William's style, even if it can sometimes be a little leaden.

Gari N. Corp

I didn't see the original article from comScore posted in the article so here it is-

[www.comscore.com]

The important part-

"The results of the study are based on data obtained from comScore's worldwide database of 2 million people who have provided comScore with explicit permission to monitor their online behavior"

byronicman

"Seems low, but it is important to keep in mind that Radiohead could have been earning only a few bucks from every CD sale under the old record label system."

Try $0.25. Major label artists really don't earn jack shit from CD sales. You get more from merch, touring, and such.

dead_red_eyes

bastages!

jbhitter24

Where did comScore get their data from? Right from the source?

Sounds a touch fishy.

DOR

How much do they make Per CD?

Brian Lam

@EQC: The band may be making more money, but that doesn't mean at least 62% of fans aren't cheap when they don't pay.

Maybe "Radiohead Fans are Cheap, but not as Cheap as the RIAA."

92BuickLeSabre

I paid 5£, or $10.40. I feel perfectly fine, especially given the fact that it is an 11 track, 42:34 long album. I paid $20 for Stadium Arcadium for 1:22:34 recently so I think it was reasonable.

moo083

Just make it DRM free, I'll pay for it.

SchruteBuck

Correct me if I am wrong, but after having downloaded (free) the album "The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust" I'd have to say thats not Trent Reznor, granted he had a hand in each song as far as the music goes, but up until i was actually listening to the songs, i thought I was going to be listening to Trent Reznors next NIN album.

*sigh* maybe next time.

rainfever

@EQC: Amen.

BlumpkinKing

Although I haven't spoken with Thom about this, I'd be willing to go out on a limb and say that the band's decision to go with their "pay if you want to" plan had nothing to do with money at all. I would think that they were wanting to go more the route of the "hey, music industry, here's our middle finger" approach. I'm sure radiohead band members, as individuals, are swimming in money; hell, they probably mix c-notes in with their Cheerios - but they got where they are by being artists of what they love to do. Pay or not, the band has ultimately gotten what they wanted - to get their music to the listner's ear.

surfer88

"Radiohead Fans are Cheap According to Study"

Cheap based on what? The monopoly/collusion-driven prices set up by the RIAA? Some of us might think that a CD selling for $10 is a ripoff -- yet, if you check out Amazon, the MSRP on many CD's is $18-$20 (granted, Amazon's actual/discount price is lower).

If 62% of American buyer's paid nothing, and 38% paid an average of $8.05 -- that's an overall average price (in the US) of $3.

That's $3 with no CD, no liner notes, no shipping/delivery costs, etc... for ~50MB of internet-delivered compressed-music data. All of that $3, I assume, went to the band, too -- much more than they likely get from a single CD sale.

EQC

I have to confess having paid only 1£... but that was with the knowledge of the poor compression and the fact that the album would be on CD later, which I will buy to make my own FLAC tracks.
I'm against paying more than once for the same content, something all music and movies execs want to make us think is good, so I thought 1£ was ok for getting the album early, as a preview before the release of the CD.

Grodesh

@daftrok:
Less than the RIAA did in one court case. :P

elecwolf

The % are not really interesting. The more important question are the numbers of people on which those % are based.

And then compare it with the numbers of records sold from the last album. And then compare the income from this methode to the income of the old method.

And then one will be able to say if this is a success or not (for the band financially).

Redwraithvienna

I say maybe 128k mono for free...to see if people like it, then more $$$$ for a higher rate, stereo clip.

Y2KGTP

how much have they made so far doing this?

daftrok

Considering how many youths I see listening to their iPods with only one earphone, I think 192kbps is fine. For portable listening, I rarely rip at greater than 128kbps. I imagine one would hear the loss on something with a large dynamic range, such as classical music, but not on most pop records.

Skeptical_Geezer

I think the problem with radiohead was, no one knew exactly what it was gonna sound like, no one was sure if it was worth any money at all and most grabbed it for as little as they could.

I think the trent strategy is the best way to go, let people sample it for nothing, and im sure a huge bulk of them will throw down fiver for the higher quality.

Five dollars for good quality mp3, is nothing, especially when you know the band is gonna get the bulk of that fiver dollars, it becomes almost a crime not to give it to them.

prodigal_son

"Compressed audio doesn't have to have farty bass lines, mushy cymbals and fwappy snare drums full of hideous artifacts."

What the hell encoder are you using? LAME V2 sounds almost perfect and it hovers around 190-210 kbps

Toastercookie

Radio-who?

dna

Uh, did you only read the bottom of my comment? What I said about mp3 sucking was clearly in reference to a very specific thing:

"Yeah, 128k sucks. If you truly want to hear some horrendous audio, check out some flash sites. Some flash designers compress stuff down to 48 kbps mono! I'd rather wait a few more seconds for the audio to load than have it sound that crappy."

I'm just saying I'm sick of hearing crappy mp3 (hint...over-compressed) audio on flash sites & wish they'd either crank up the kbps or use a lower bit rate AAC. (is AAC possible in flash?) Funny thing is, audio usually isn't the reason flash sites take forever to load anyway. Are there any flash designers in here that can educate me as to why the audio has to suck so bad?

johnnyrandom

@johnnyrandom: "Are there any flash designers in here that can educate me as to why the audio has to suck so bad?"

I'm not a flash designer, but I do a lot of work around websites, and from my experience I would say a lot of video/audio content on the internet suck mainly because of bandwidth. Imagine this scenario: with 1000 users on a website, 1 mb larger audio file = 1gb more transfer for a single audio file. Keep in mind 1000 users is not a lot for a website, and it's only for one audio track. If there's one improvement that us geeks will always need, that would be a better internet connection (more reliable, faster, cheaper).

fufinache

If you look closely at the numbers, this has been a huge success by most measures. The average price per download was $2.26 in October, and that includes the people who downloaded for free. Radiohead likely has a sweetheart deal with EMI, but even so, it would be unlikely they make more than $2-$3 per album sale. Sales on iTunes return less than $1 to the artist. Plus, the site traffic has been driving very good numbers of Discbox sales, which returns very high profits to the band. For every $1 in download sales, there's been $2 dollars in Discbox sales. They're still going to sell a conventional CD, and while the downloads may cut into those sales, I'd bet a decent share of new fans via free downloads will want the CD.

xtol7

"As Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood said a few days ago, the band's intent is not to start a revolution or give away its music, but rather to prevent it from leaking out to the public haphazardly over several months before the official CD release next year. In turn, it is the band's hope that once fans hear the music on compressed MP3 files, they'll want to buy the sonically superior physical product."
-[leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com]

yea, i didn't pay but i'm absolutely gonna buy the CD when it's released.

dothedrewtoo

Articles title should have read: 'Radiohead no longer making fans pay money for something that they dont know what it is until after they've paid for it, eliminating that "rip-off" feeling so often associated with buying music blind'

a bit wordy, but better than "radiohead fans are cheap"

sounds like riaa propaganda with the aim of shitting on radiohead from their tower.

nutbastard

as a white man... is it ok to say, "niggy"?

nutbastard

it sounds like 21% paid an average of $6, if I am reading this correctly. Or 250,000. So, radiohead would have made 1.5 million dollars in less than a week. They would have had to sell at least one million to make that return from a label deal, fattening up a bunch of middle men along the way (retailers, label execs). This way we all got something of value for the same net price that the artist would have received. Sounds unbelievably fair to me.
The shuffleboil review of Niggy is not so good, however. (www.shuffleboil.com)

Sparkylulu

@fufinache: I'm still not getting it.
Sorry, I'm not claiming to be an expert on how servers work, so bear with me. If the audio bandwidth is the issue (I thought the visual aspect of flash was hogging the bandwidth) then why doesn't Flash use AAC? The quality would still be better and the file sizes would remain super small.

johnnyrandom

Eh, I paid whatever the US equiv is of 4 quid for the radiohead music, just to support their efforts. After listening to the tracks (can we call it an album?) I like it OK, I guess, but I'm not a huge Radiohead fan.

I also paid the $5 for Saul Williams' FLAC tracks and burned them to a CD, again, just to support his efforts. I may give the CD away to someone who might appreciate it more.

Marco

Among all of Radiohead's musical and professional accomplishments, we now have two new ones: One is a subtle fist for musicians to brandish at labels in the negotiation chamber. Two is this incredible marketing study.

Considering how many players in the music industry were watching to see how this experiment would go, I'm sort of surprised that Radiohead didn't auction off a live feed of their sales reports directly to somebody, instead of just letting Comscore monitor its herd of volunteers. But I guess that's simply not what Radiohead does.

Also- I'm curious to know what was the highest price anyone paid to download the album.

stronzo