Radiohead challenges music download industry

Revolutionary tactic will test fans’ loyalty

Rock band Radiohead has announced that it intends to let fans pay what they like to download its new album.

The group’s website is giving punters the chance to dictate their own price for the new album, ‘In Rainbows’, which is available to download from 10 October but can be pre-ordered now.

After adding the album to your basket, you are greeted by an empty payment box and a ‘?’ symbol. Clicking the symbol opens a page where it simply says: ‘It’s up to you’ and clicking the symbol again opens a page that reads, ‘No really, it’s up to you’.

This is the band’s first self-financed album since it left EMI and it’s the first ever music download where fans decide what they’d like to pay.

Fans will also get a chance to buy a special disc-box version, for £40, which contains a CD version, artwork, photographs, lyrics booklets, two 12in vinyl records, and a special CD with new songs, digital photos and artwork. It also comes with the download version of the album and will ship on 3 December.

The move flies in the face of current music downloads services like iTunes, where individual tracks cost 79p, or 99p for a copyright-free version. Radiohead’s experiment will test whether or not enough fans will be willing to pay a ‘fair price’ to the bands they love.

If so, other artists are likely to follow, especially since they tend to receive only a small percentage of record sale revenues when they work with a record label.