[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by dazedcola

Btw; i'm pretty sure they alluded to the whole pay what you want idea for in rainbows turned out to be a failure financially and thats why they're not doing it again. A noble experiment into retrospect

what did cost them was essentially hosting the free server for download, and obviously they had a lot of traffic. Shit, when they played the hollywood bowl in 2008 they set a Ticketmaster.com record for traffic and almost overloaded their massive international servers so you can only imagine what kind of traffic radiohead.com was maintaining..

According to reports most fans chose to pay nothing to download the album. However, it still generated more money before it was physically released (on December 31) than the total money generated by sales of the band's previous album, 2003's 'Hail To The Thief'.

According to Music Ally, Jane Dyball, head of business affairs at Warner Chappell (the publishing company that oversaw the release of 'In Rainbows'), refused to reveal the average price people were downloading the album for.

However, Dyball, set to speak about the release at the Iceland Airwaves conference later, explained that Warner Chappell and Radiohead's management were monitoring the average price daily, and was prepared to cancel the download facility if the average price became too low.

The download facility was taken down after three months, and the album went to Number One in the UK and USA after being physically released.

Statistics revealed that most fans downloaded the album through file-sharing service BitTorrent, but that this had been anticipated before the release.

The band sold 100,000 copies of the 'In Rainbows' box set, which contained extra songs not available on the standard download or CD release.

Warner Chappell concluded that the new release style was a financial success, but did not reveal whether Radiohead plan to release an album in a similar way in the future.