Netsets Weblog

I read with interest the disruption caused by British rock band Radiohead releasing their latest album In Rainbows via their own web site.  This challenges various aspects of the established business models, in that they are not using a label to release their music which means that they are free to charge what they want. 

When you visit the Radiohead site, you are given the option to choose how much you pay for the album, in an attempt to reduce on-line piracy. However digg have indicated that large numbers of the album were pirated rather than downloaded from their site.  I am not surprised about this, as old habbits die hard, and it will take some time for people who use file sharing sites like The Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy, to change their habbits. 

In the first week over 500,000 illegal copies were made compared to the 1.2 million legitimate pre-orders and downloads.  Forbes reported that Doug Litchman, an Intellectual property profressor at UCLA suggested that “users may have interpreted Radiohead’s offer as a giveaway and so felt more comfortable downloading the album from other free sources”, and that people were not comfortable providing their email address and postal addresses in exchange for the music, something required by the Radiohead web site.