Kidson Talks | The E-commerce Chemist

Its all over the blogosphere, the news, the internet is rife with the release of ‘In Rainbows‘

You can choose your own price for the 160 kilobits per second mp3 of the album putting their fans in total control. The quiet announcement on their website was spread though word of internet, so much so that there server crashed on Oct 1st. Quite a few artists are now challenging the music industry and no even trying to prevent illegal downloading. The internet has let artists sell direct to the fans and also smaller independent musicians can create a fan base through social media.

Music goes Social and there is nothing EMI and Sony can do about it but join the race. Artists now use the power of blogs, forums, social communities and file sharing software (usually dubbed ‘illegal’) to make sure their sound is spread across the world. Artists will now have to tour and gig more for their money, unless the fans decide to keep up the ‘donation’ for tracks. It would be interesting to know the average price paid for the album download.

I would pay around £5-6 for a download happily, and I do know that the people that paid for their download of the new Radiohead album full plan to also buy the CD once it has released. An artist can even see if it is worth investing in a CD launch on the back of the success of a download release.

It has been rumoured that the average price paid for the download is around $10

I will blog the real statistics once they have been officially published.

Edited on the 6th Nov:

The average price paid for the album was $6 (£2.90), the study - based on a survey of the online behaviour of over two million internet users - found.

American fans were the most generous, paying on average $8.05 (£3.85), compared to the $4.64 (£2.22) paid by those outside the US.

Most ‘paid nothing for Radiohead’