Somebody recently informed me about an increasing trend happening in the music industry. In 2007 Radiohead's album In Rainbows was available to fans online only, fans were asked to pay as much as they liked, weather that be a small fee or nothing at all for the album. In Rainbows is now unavailable to be downloaded online Radiohead was both criticized and praised for this shift away from the mainstream way of album sales.
Some thought that Radiohead had condemned themselves for such a radical move, 38% of downloaders chose to pay for the album, and it sold at an average price of $6 according to comScore records. There was also special gift sets available to buy, a discbox which "included a vinyl album, bonus CD, and assortment of other trinkets" comScore which sold for $80 US. Radiohead made an estimated 3 million out of the media experiment, if they had stuck with EMI (their former record company) it is estimated that they would have had to sell 10 times the amount of albums downloaded.
Karen Hellekson an independent scholar, outlines in her article From Irrelevance to On-Demand: Changing models of Dissemination that "...[some] hailed Radiohead for parlaying their fame and huge fan base into a successful experiment that other bands might model, with the web used to officially market and distribute a product directly to fans" And other bands did follow the commercially successful experiment, for example Nine Inch Nails and Coldplay.
Radiohead managed to make more money than they would have in staying with the record company and they also managed to increase the number of new fans. Radiohead effectively cut out the middlemen, their agent, record labels, recording companies, promoters, record shops, some transporting and storage, they sold (or gave away) directly to their target audience. This process is known as disintermediation and is becoming increasingly more and more popular in the music industry.
Radiohead is one of the few bands that have resisted the Apples iTunes store, they chose to give the power to the people rather than the power to the industry. They started the ball rolling for playing the game by a different set of rules and the Mr Big CEOs of the music industry are not happy (Warner, EMI, Sony BMG and Universal Music Group).
Offering the album free of cost to the fans washed away all rules surrounding piracy and copy writing, people were free to do what they wished, mash up re mix or reuse the music. This tactic, giving the audience the power is becoming increasingly popular in the media industry, not only in the music industry but in news production and computer programming (open source software) traditional models are being placed under continual pressure. The audience is no longer passive we have a voice, all we were looking for was our soap box... The World Wide Web.
Consumers, choose what they like from online music stores, gone are the days of the cassette and vinyl (soon to be CDs too) and out emerges rise of digital media. Digital music, book and movie stores have their advantages over physical retail stores, disintermediation - so the cost of products are reduced, recommendations- 'other customers who bought this book also bought this book' these options open new doors to consumers to tap into new subject areas or niche books that they originally may not have thought they had much interest in.
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I thought it was very interesting that other bands like Nine Inch Nails have also dumped their record label and chosen to follow the same path as Radiohead. I just found this article I was reading not long ago with a quote from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails…
"I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate."
I think this shows that recording artists know that the music industry is changing and that lately they are much more open to have a direct relationship with their fans. I remember about a month ago, Radiohead also broke up their new single into sections available for download, so that fans were able to remix the song. They could upload their finished remixes and be judged and even voted on by the public. Fans were also able to create a widget allowing votes from their own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be sent through too. I find this is interesting as they are taking it another step further in involving the audience and cutting out the “middle men”, as you said. I certainly agree that giving the audience the power is becoming increasingly popular in the media industry and this can be seen through these bands moving away from recording labels and becoming more independent but involved with their audience.
References
Moulds, J. 2007. Nine Inch Nails follows Radiohead and dumps label.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/10/09/bcnnine109.xml
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