Radiohead Gives the Music Industry the Finger

A little catchup. Indie rockers, Radiohead, known for songs like "Creep" and "Karma Police", ditched their record label and recorded their new album. They decided to release it exclusively through their website. Here were their options:

1. Buy a box set for 40 pounds which included vinyl records, a CD and artwork, or
   
   
2. Make a donation and you can have the album for free as a high-quality download.

The band got a helluva lot of publicity from this promotion. Bands and marketers were buzzing for the last couple o'weeks. One week after the official release of the album and the results are in. The band sold 1.2 million albums. At an average of $8 per album sold, they made a gross profit of over $10 million dollars. Wow! That's amazing!

So what does all this mean? Is it the end of paying for music forever as some assume?

Hardly. Bob Baker pointed out one of the more important points of this promotion, namely the upselling factor. Seth Godin points out the value of permission marketing, namely that the band now has one million people they can contact to sell to when their next album comes out as well.

I've been giving away music downloads for eight years now. As a music marketer, I try out a ton of promotional ideas to try and build my own fan base. And if my downloads were half as successful. I'd be a rich bard. But alas... I'm still struggling.

Does that mean I won't try something similar? Ye never know. As I said, I try a lot of promo ideas. Let's see...

• MarcSongs Podcast. Began as an idea I saw Roger McGuinn do. Jonathan Coulton refined it with the Thing-A-Week. I took the idea and focused it on a niche, Irish songs, until I decided to change it into a me thing.
  
  
• I've had live recordings and bard bootlegs available for a donation for a while.
  
  
• I also started Song Henge as a way to help other bands, where once a month, subscribers get ZIP file packed with Celtic mp3s from a wide variety of artists.
  
  
• I never expected that podcasts, in general, would earn me so much traffic and popularity, but after listening to the Celtic Music News Podcast and DragonPage WingingIt, I decided to give it a try.
  

I have a TON of ideas I've seen and learned and implemented from other marketers. Not all of them are successful. The live recordings and bootlegs, have yielded minimal sales. Whereas Song Henge is a nice bonus to my monthly income. My Celtic and Ren Fest Podcasts generate a lot of goodwill and build fans. But thusfar, MarcSongs Podcasts has yielded no noticeable response.

Ultimately, Radioheads success is the tip of the iceberg. They were the first to generate the publicity and make a splash in the world with this technique. A lot of copycats (including me) will jump on the bandwagon at some point or another. But none will see the results that Radiohead has seen. The trick is to make it fit for what you have to offer.

For instance, this is something that appeals greatly to me for the release of my next solo CD, A Tribute to Love. I've been looking for an idea like this with a proven response. Though my ideas are not quite together on it either. So fortunately, I still have time before it is released. So stay tuned for amazingness!

As for Radiohead, I commend them on an outstanding promotion and pretty dang good album too!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Labels: scribbles

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posted by Marc Gunn @ Saturday, October 20, 2007