It’s been a week, the music industry has survived (apparently) and Radiohead have distributed over 1.2 million albums from their website. It’s not clear if these are all paying or not but either way you can bet that their next tour (coming 2008) will be a sell out.
According to a poll of 3,000 people the average payment was $8, so four quid – £4.8 million in a week. Seems a bit of a lesson to me…
To be honest I’m not sure how accurate we can call these figures but even if it were for free, that’s a lot of new fans in there. If I remember rightly there was an admin fee of 45p, which makes over £500,000 in administrative fees, presumably for bandwidth and storage (bet they wish they’d used Amazon S3 now).
The Big Champagne guys (they track downloads through p2p networks and bittorrent) are on about how illicit downloads of the album are dwarfing the real sales, but frankly, so what? More awareness, more fans, more merchandise, more gigs, more money – less need for a label or any traditional media coverage.