Musicadium Blog

I can understand he’s upset about The Cure’s not so popular album release of 4:13 Dream last year but he shouldn’t be rubbishing the model of one of the (rare) successful online record launches we’ve seen.

As we all know, Radiohead stuck it to the man in 2007 with their release of “In Rainbows”. They let us decide just how much money we thought their music was worth.

Releasing the album in digital format through their website, customers could pay what they wanted or nothing at all. The site only advised, “It’s up to you.”  This didn’t dampen the value of the music. Rather, it made us think.  It gave us the power to either do the right thing by them, or by ourselves.

In an interview with Music Radar on Tuesday February 24th Smith was quoted:

“The Radiohead experiment of paying what you want - I disagreed violently with that. The idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan. You can’t allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don’t consider what you do to have any value at all and that’s nonsense. If I put a value on my music and no one’s prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan, it can’t work.”

Justifiably, recorded music has traditionally been distributed successfully by way of a physical medium; today however, sales of compact disc recordings are down. Nevertheless, consumption of music is well and truly up, festivals and club shows are selling out across Australia in a matter of minutes, and there has been an explosion of new bands, artists, genres and songs. iTunes has recently surpassed Wal-Mart as the number one music retailer in the United States and digital music now accounts for 20% of all recorded music sales, up from 15% in 2007.

Trying to back pedal after receiving bad press for his Radiohead bashing he wrote (in caps lock) a blog posted February 28th on The Cure’s website:

“ANY FAMOUS ARTIST WITH A HUGE AND DEVOTED FAN BASE (OFTEN ARRIVED AT WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM A WEALTHY AND POWERFUL ‘PATRON’ OR TWO?) CAN AFFORD TO DO WHAT HE, SHE OR IT WANTS…
INCLUDING GIVING THEIR ART AWAY AS SOME KIND OF ‘LOSSLEADER’ TO HELP ‘BUILD THE BRAND”

Despite Radiohead’s risky strategy, The Album went to #1 in the UK and the US when released physically on CD/vinyl in early 2008.  The Cure’s 4:13 Dream however peaked at #33 in the UK and # 16 in the US.

Nine Inch Nails and Bad Religion are two of many other bands who are also trying to find another revenue stream other than physical sales trying to add value to ‘the unit.’  This includes additional incentives like photos, posters, additional tracks, and other motivations to sell a “deluxe edition” of the CD or vinyl.

At the moment there is still a place for physical sales, although we can’t cling to an outdated industry model that clearly doesn’t work in the digital age. When a consumer offers a price in Radiohead’s model, they are giving a value to that artists work.  By being given the option people are more likely to assess and pay what they think is fair rather than download illegally from torrents and the like.

The music industry is far from dead: the traditional model sadly is.  Fans are willing to spend money on buying music, but the last few decades have changed the medium in which this is done.  For bands to remain both accessible and relevant to fans there is no questioning the fact that music needs to be available online in some form.

“If I put a value on my music and no one’s prepared to pay that, then more fool me”

Perhaps Smith needs to realise its just hard to put a value on anything post “Bloodflowers”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Digital Distribution, General, Industry News & Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.