Radiohead to Smother Music Industry with Pillow

As has been noted in several places, Radiohead today announced their plans for distribution of their forthcoming album, In Rainbows. I've been speculating on this for a while, as I noted a year or so back that they were without record contract, and didn't really need one. And I'm not in the least surprised by what they're doing - letting fans decide how much to pay:

This weekend the band announced that its new album, called "In Rainbows," will go on sale on Oct. 10. They still haven't signed with a label, and the album won't be available in record stores nor on iTunes or any other online music shop. You'll find it only on the band's site, and if you're looking for a digital version, the price is very attractive: Whatever you'd like to pay.

You can pre-order the new album here. Click to purchase the download and you're presented with a simple screen at which you've got two boxes to fill in, quantity and price (in pounds). "It's up to you," the site says.

This makes me incredibly happy. Not just that there's a new Radiohead album dropping two days after my birthday, and not just that it'll be as free as I want it to be, but that they're doing their part to bring to a close the current structure of the corrupt, extortionist record industry:

Radiohead completed their contract with the EMI label with their last album, "Hail to the Thief," and since then have not kept their antipathy toward record companies very secret. In this clip a fan pleads, "Tell us about the new album!" Yorke answers, "Who says there's an album?" And when the New York Times asked him about it last year, Yorke drew a picture of a band deeply disillusioned with the state of the music industry today. "We were having endless debates, spending entire afternoons talking about, 'Well, if we do something, how do we put it out?' ... It just became this endless and pointless discussion. Because in our dreams, it would be really nice to just let off this enormous stink bomb in the industry."

...

For every $1 song sold on iTunes, according to reports, Apple keeps about 30 cents, giving about 70 to the record label. But activists say artists typically get just 8 to 14 cents per song from the deal -- or about $0.80 to $1.40 per album sold digitally.

So that's the main test here; in order for the band to come out ahead, Radiohead needs to clear only more than a buck-50 per sale. Easy.

And that's supposing that they even care about making money from the album (as opposed to their sold-out-in-perpetuity tours) which, millionaires many times over, they don't really need to worry about.

Yet another emergent model for how to make money online for creative efforts, and one that bears watching both for its own success (highly likely) or further adoption (also likely).