Radiohead May Have Made $6-$10 Million on Name-Your Cost Album

mytrip passed us a link to a Wired article indcating that if music industry estimates are correct Radiohead has made as much as $10 million on the 'In Rainbows' album so far. This despite the estimates of widespread piracy of the album as well. "[The estimate assumes] that approximately 1.2 million people downloaded the album from the site, and that the average price paid per album was $8 (we heard that number too, but also heard that a later, more accurate average was $5, which would result in $6 million in revenue instead).

There is only one way to find out the truth.

[Funkcikle]

If you downloaded the Radiohead album please reply here and say how much you paid, so that we can send a bill for our rightful share to Radiohead.

Sincerely yours,
The RIAA

Completely Irrelevant

[Ambiguous Coward]

This is all well and good, but it completely ignores the fact that if people are pirating music, the artists can't make any money!

-G

Re:Who the fuck is radiohead?

[joe_bruin]

Who the fuck is radiohead?

Karma police, arrest this man.

Re:There is only one way to find out the truth.

[Korveck]

Negative one hundred and two million Euro. Now go get your share.

Re:Who the fuck is radiohead?

[netsavior]

what a Creep

Re:There is only one way to find out the truth.

[Funkcikle]

Negative one hundred and two million Euro. Now go get your share.

Our accountants have put this into our Excel spreadsheet and apparently we are in for a LOT of money.

Re:Who the fuck is radiohead?

[WIAKywbfatw]

Who the fuck is radiohead?

When I am King you will be first against the wall.

Hang on a sec, that abbreviated would make a cool ID. I really should do that...

Re:Who the fuck is radiohead?

[ilikejam]

How long have you been waiting for that?

Re:Who the fuck is radiohead?

[GrubInCan]

You could have just given him Low Morale [lowmorale.co.uk]

Thats it !! Im quitting web development

[unity100]

and starting up a band asap !!

Re:for the record

[noidentity]

"Making $6-$10 million on a new album the week it comes out is _unheard-of_ in the music biz"

That's because this doesn't take into account all the production costs. Ask the MAFIAA, distributing online music is very expensive, perhaps even moreso than CDs. There's well... duplicating the bits hmmm. You'd have to ask the MAFIAA since I'm not an expert in their area.

Re:Not as Altruistic as First Appears

[theNeophile]

Radiohead has always been planning on releasing their CD [gizmodo.com] in January. Putting out a 160 kbps crap quality version is there way to whet your appetite for the real CD, which will probably contain more content than the mp3 release and be of much better quality.

They're clearly hoping to sell to the 0.05% of people that can tell the difference.

Re:and that is the threat to the big labels;

[budgenator]

OMG think of the Children! if the record companies didn't make as much money, then they couldn't pay the lawyers to sue gradnmas with multiple scerosis for piracy and the lawyer's children mught have to go to Public Schools !

Re:Who the fuck is radiohead?

[aleander]

Yes. That would be RIAA trying to buy out all the copies.

Re:for the record

[Tuoqui]

Naw Uncle Sam takes 40%... Still a huge lump of cash they're sitting on though.

Re:for the record

[ucblockhead]

Wow! I hadn't realized the IRS took over the UK!

A Great Disturbance in The Force

[HangingChad]

Darth RIAA just felt a great shudder go through the record industry. As if thousands of A&R reps cried out at once and were suddenly silenced.

Re:Who the fuck is radiohead?

[p3d0]

If one in 300 people in the US and England bought the album you would have at least that many sales. Or if half of the people in New York City under the age of 18 bought the album you would have that many.

Right. And if just 1% of the cells in your body bought the album, well that would be 500 billion sales right there, so 1.2 million is no big deal.

Re:One thing's for sure:

[Paul_Hindt]

would artists make the same sort of profits (eclipsing POS sales) if this model was more common place?

Uh...why would I want to spend money on a Piece of Shit?

Re:Who the fuck is radiohead?

[WIAKywbfatw]

Hey, when life throws you a soft pitch like that you don't just tap it for a single, you smack it out of the park.

Re:for the record

[Anonymous Coward]

name me another industry where you can make a 10000% profit margin?

drugs. :)

Re:yhey are gay group catering to homosexuals

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for being our go-to guy for current info about the gay community.

Re:Who the fuck is radiohead?

[10bellies]

Van Gogh Sold 1 hole painting

The original Goatse?