Exclusive: Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pot of gold
Warner Chappell will today reveal details of their view of the Radiohead licensing experiment at the “You Are in Control” conference in Iceland, including total sales figures of more than three million for ‘In Rainbows’.
The UK-based branch of the publishing company licensed all digital rights including master recording rights and image and likeness rights on behalf of the band in a groundbreaking move for them as well as the band.
Today Warner Chappell’s Head of Business Affairs Jane Dyball will reveal that the digital publishing income from the first licence (for the Radiohead pay what you want site) alone dwarfed all the band’s previous digital publishing income and made a “material difference” to Warner Chappell UK’s digital income.
The publisher will also confirm that Radiohead had made more money before ‘In Rainbows’ was physically released than they made in total on the previous album ‘Hail To the Thief’. It should be pointed out that Radiohead’s existing digital income was of course low, because they had withheld licensing the likes of iTunes.
The topline figure, though, is that there were three million purchases of In Rainbows, including physical CDs, box-sets, and all downloads – including those from the band’s own website and from other digital music stores.
The presentation represents the first time that the ‘official’ view of the Radiohead experiment has been heard. The fact that Warner Chappell played such a pivotal role in the initiative has been rather lost in all the noise which has since accompanied Radiohead’s daring and genuinely ground breaking campaign. Indeed the publisher has been almost Radiohead-like by staying so quiet.
But the first anniversary of the release has provided an opportunity for some more light to be shed on the initiative. Jane Dyball will this morning give a keynote speech to the “You Are in Control” conference in Iceland to which Music Ally was given exclusive access.
Really there seems little doubt that the experiment was a success from both Warner’s and the band’s perspective. For Warner it served to prove a point that by licensing directly (ie outside the collecting society network) and by offering a genuine one stop shop for licensing (ie combining all the digital rights into one offer from a single entity) the publisher was able to generate far more money for both themselves and the band than would have been possible under the traditional system.
Good news for them but bad news for collecting societies such as the MCPS-PRS Alliance which was forced to bend its own rules in order to allow an initiative to go ahead, which then served to prove how much more money can be made without their involvement.
The reasons for this are too varied and complex to go into in any great detail. But fundamentally the publisher was able to move faster and do quick deals (with everyone from Radiohead itself to iTunes and Last.fm) which would ensure the money came in straight away. But Dyball is also clear that this is not about to lead to the publisher withdrawing rights en masse from the society network.
Where Dyball is arguably less successful is in busting some of the ‘myths’ which have grown up around the experiment. Firstly, the most effective way to confront the claim that the average unit price was too low would have been to reveal what the average price in fact was.
Instead Dyball points to the fact that the band and their management never announced a timeline for the pay-what-you-like experiment and were watching the average price daily with a view to potentially withdrawing it any moment should it drop too low. Dyball points out that the average price went down after the download moved from uberfans to less committed fans, as expected.
It’s clear that the BitTorrent downloads did indeed greatly outnumber those from Radiohead’s official site. But this was almost certainly always likely to be the case and all of this should not negate the ’success’ of the experiment. And it was certainly an interesting aside to learn that of the dozen or so exclusive members of the ‘circle of trust’ who knew about the whole pay-what-you-like experiment before it launched, it was the band’s manager Chris Hufford from Courtyard management who won the sweepstakes on how many downloads there would be, the average price paid and how many box sets they would shift!
So how many did they shift? Well, according to Dyball there were a total of three million album purchases including the box sets, CDs and all downloads including iTunes and pay-what-you-like downloads via their official site. That’s an incredible number, given that their previous three albums sold in the low hundreds of thousands.
What about the claims that “no permissions were secured to use email addresses for future marketing”. Dyball confronts this by pointing to the fact that “Radiohead don’t want to sell or misuse addresses and will only use them to offer fan-focused value added services if they feel it’s appropriate.”
While that may well be true, that’s not the point really. It may have been more cock up than an issue of marketing permissions but we have still yet to find anyone who received a follow up email from the band until the release of Reckoner – way after most of the gigs and other campaign milestones had taken place.
But again this should not lead to the conclusion that the campaign failed. This was virgin territory for everyone involved. And, at least, when it came to the Nude ’stems’ release which received some criticism (when the band originally charged for each ’stem’ of the track which could be then be remixed by the fans), it meant that the band could respond by offering Reckoner stems for free to those who had bought by the Nude stems.
One myth which Dyball is completely successful in busting is the accusation that the band were somehow foolish by giving away the songs for free. The fact that Radiohead had made more money before ‘In Rainbows’ was physically released than they made in total on ‘Hail To the Thief’ is surely evidence enough that the initiative was a tremendous success.
In fact, if anything, the only trouble with the whole thing was that it was just arguably too successful. The whole ‘pay what you like’ experiment became the story rather than the music itself. And that’s not so Radiohead. The band and Thom Yorke initially found themselves answering questions about why they chose to do what they did rather than being asked about the music itself.
At the end of the day In Rainbows is arguably a better album than Hail to the Thief, though clearly not so classic as, say, OK Computer. And lest we forget the quality of the music should also be considered when judging whether the initiative was a ’success’.
The band may not do things the same again. But the significance of the initiative, and the fact that they even tried it, is a huge testament to a band who remain such trend setters, even today some 15 years after the release of their first album.
THE STATS
• After being made available for free for 3 months the album was no.1 in the UK and in the US
• 1st Radiohead album on iTunes – no.1 album selling 30,000 units in the US in the first week
• The physical CD has sold 1.75 million to date and is still top 200 UK & US
• They sold 100k boxsets via W.A.S.T.E.
• Nearing 17 million plays on last.fm
• 1.2 million fans will see the tour
• The digital income from the experiment made a material difference to WCM’s UK digital revenue this year
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Tags: In Rainbows, Radiohead
October 15th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
[...] Warner Chappell’s head of business affairs, Jane Dyball, allegedly revealed these new figures at an industry event in Iceland, as reported by music industry analysts, Music Ally. [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
In Rainbows is every bit of a classic album as Ok Computer. In fact in my opinion, it is better.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
[...] Music Ally, Jane Dyball, responsable de los asuntos comerciales de Warner Chappell (la compañía editora que [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
[...] Here’ some of the very impressive stats, courtesy of Music Ally: [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Do you smell that??
it smell’s like times are a changin’… slowly.
They made more money off a download album then a physical cd. When will the Dinosaurs learn that they don’t have to run from the future.
NewRockstarPhilosophy.com
October 15th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
[...] Via Music Ally [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
[...] news of some numbers relating to Radiohead’s pioneering “pay whatever you want” experiment with their album In Rainbows. The stats come from a speech given by Jane Dyball, head of business affairs for the [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
[...] today, Musically.com has an article about the ultimate results that In Rainbows saw with its “pay as you please” release. [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
[...] to the NME and Music Ally articles, Jane Dyball, the head of business affairs at Warner Chappell, who were the company behind [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
[...] sitio Music Ally, pudo conversar con Jane Dyball, responsable de los asuntos comerciales de Warner Chappell (la [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
[...] o disco novo deles, ou então se baixou por por P2P/Rapidshare/Torrent. “In Rainbows”, reporta o blog Musically.com, vendeu o [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
[...] -Music Ally [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
[...] the album’s success, more general descriptions of which have been floating around the net. Music Ally reports that very generally speaking, the album was a huge success all in all, selling three [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I purchased In Rainbows, and named my own price. But their servers were so busy that when I tried to download the album it froze, and then wouldn’t allow me to download because I had already used that download code (unsucessfully) So I went to a torrent and got it that way. I wonder how many people use torrent to get an album onto their computer and music player when they already own the real cd, I do it all the time.
October 15th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
[...] a Music Ally teve oportunidade de conversar com Jane Dyball, responsável pela divisão de assuntos comerciais da Warner Chappel, a editora de [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
[...] reproducido en Last.fm • 1,2 millones de fans han visto el show durante el tour. Enlace : MusicalliBlog Leer mas Escribe una [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
[...] Source. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
[...] Go Radiohead! [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
[...] Exclusive: Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” pot of gold [Music Ally] [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
[...] “In Rainbows” zum zahlt-was-ihr-wollt-Tarif auf ihre Internetseite gestellt und laut http://www.musically.com haben sie alleine mit dieser Aktion schon mehr verdient als am Vorgängeralbum “Hail To The [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
[...] was physically released than they made in total on the previous album Hail To the Thief,” Music Ally reports. In all, there have been three million purchases of In Rainbows (including CDs, vinyls, box sets [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
[...] plus de détails, http://musically.com/blog/2008/10/15/exclusive-warner-chappell-reveals-radioheads-in-rainbows-pot-of... [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
To say that Radiohead was the first to give away it’s music or release an album online as a pay-what-you-want method is a complete negation of all the independent musicians and artists who have been doing this for years (myself included).
The media has really picked up on this story because it is impressed because Radiohead put potential millions of dollars on the line–millions of dollars that industry folk are convinced their fan base would have given them no matter what they put out (including a flaming pile of poo).
So Christopher Columbus discovered America?
October 15th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
[...] 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 [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 2:55 am
[...] Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead?s ?In Rainbows? pot of goldFrom just about every measure, Radiohead’s "In Rainbows" experiment was a success. One of the biggest takeaways from this is that it was number #1 as a physical CD three months after being available for free as a digital download. The logical conclusion, of course, is that the free downloads served as an advertisement for the album. Another logical conclusion: downloading is not so much killing the record industry in the manner that they’ve been screaming about for the past decade. [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 5:01 am
[...] Dyball’s figures from “digital music business information and strategy company” Music Ally– which has been confirmed by Radiohead’s publicist– In Rainbows certainly worked [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 11:45 am
[...] quoted facts and figures from “digital music business information and strategy company” Music Ally. If you include downloads from the In Rainbows site, physical CDs and the special vinyl discbox [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
[...] was physically released than they made in total on Hail to the Thief”. So a success then!Go here to read Music Ally’s full report Published Thursday, October 16, 2008 4:14 PM by Lloyd Filed [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
[...] the final numbers are in. In short, In Rainbows sold better than their last album, selling 1.75 million copies of the [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
[...] Exclusive: Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pot of gold at Music Ally [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
[...] the final numbers are in. In short, In Rainbows sold better than their last album, selling 1.75 million copies of the [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
[...] the final numbers are in. In short, In Rainbows sold better than their last album, selling 1.75 million copies of the [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
[...] even if the band was quiet about the numbers. However, Radiohead’s publisher has now come out and revealed some of the numbers and debunked the myth that the experiment was a failure (thanks to SteveD for sending this over). Instead, it turns out that Radiohead made much more money [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
[...] the final numbers are in. In short, In Rainbows sold better than their last album, selling 1.75 million copies of the [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
[...] Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pot of gold Warner Chappell will today reveal details of their view of the Radiohead licensing experiment at the “You Are in Control” conference in Iceland, including total sales figures of more than three million for ‘In Rainbows’. [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
No one said they were the FIRST overall, but they were certainly the first viable (sorry, indie artists) act to do so. Jonah Matranga from Far/onelinedrawing has been doing it for years. But the 50-100k he makes per year ain’t newsworthy.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
[...] Music Ally | Blog Archive » Exclusive: Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pot … – [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
[...] to the Music cAlly report, most fans chose to pay nothing to download the album. However, it still generated more [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
[...] и одну неделю назад седьмой студийный альбом In Rainbows продавался лучше предыдущего Hail to the Thief (на котором, кстати, появились мои любимые [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
[...] een succes te zijn Het donatiemodel waarvoor Radiohead koos blijkt zeer succesvol. Lees daarvoor “Exclusive: Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pot of gold”. [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
[...] Meer hier. [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
[...] label Warner Chappell which licensed all digital and recording rights for the band, according to musically.com and MediaGuardian. Speaking at the You Are In Control conference in Iceland today, she revealed [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
[...] MusicAlly [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
My favorite stat: 100,000 Box sets @ $80 each = $8,000,000 (minus the cost of making them) DIRECTLY to the band (plus 100% of royalties!… no BS deductions from a label)
October 17th, 2008 at 2:22 am
[...] if the band was quiet about the numbers. However, Radiohead’s publisher has now come out and revealed some of the numbers and debunked the myth that the experiment was a failure (thanks to SteveD for sending this over). Instead, it turns out that Radiohead made much more money [...]
October 17th, 2008 at 3:41 am
[...] Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” made more money than “Hail to the Thief.” I paid three bucks for it, and I don’t really feel that [...]
October 17th, 2008 at 7:51 am
[...] te invito a opinar. Es más, te urjo a hacerlo. Anda. ¡Opina! Enlaces Fuente: MusicAlly Cifras de comScore: Alt1040 google_hints = ‘Creative Commons,DRM,in [...]
October 17th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
[...] weblog ViNT/Mucic Ally; foto van [...]
October 17th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
[...] figured that showed the inadequacy of net-native distribution. There’s one problem, though: Radiohead sold very many more copies of In Rainbows than their previous albums. “Warner Chappell’s Head of Business Affairs Jane [...]
October 17th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
[...] if the band was quiet about the numbers. However, Radiohead’s publisher has now come out and revealed some of the numbers and debunked the myth that the experiment was a failure (thanks to SteveD for sending this over). Instead, it turns out that Radiohead made much more money [...]
October 18th, 2008 at 3:33 am
[...] Un dato actualizado de último momento es el que Jane Dyball, esta responsable de la discográfica Warner/Chappell , difundiera en el evento “You Are In Control” en Reykiavik, el cual asegura que más de 30.000 personas pagaron el precio completo del álbum cuando este salió en la tienda online de discos iTunes. En el blog de Cucharasónica, realizaron una brillante síntesis del artículo publicado “music: )ally”: [...]
October 18th, 2008 at 5:21 am
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
October 18th, 2008 at 8:53 am
[...] Chappel, qui gère les droits du groupe, a confirmé que Radiohead a gagné plus d’argent avec les téléchargements à prix libres de In Rainbows [...]
October 18th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
[...] Warner (for Radiohead sto absolutt ikke alene bak denne bedriften, slik de fleste har trodd) har sett lyset og innser at band og plateselskap/managements av den nye skolen KAN tjene inn langt mer spenn enn [...]
October 18th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
[...] e delle successive statistiche diffuse per infangare l’iniziativa. Sono usciti i dati ufficiali ed è stato un successo! Apparte le ovvie considerazioni sul fatto che come prima esperienza di [...]
October 19th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
[...] meldte igår at Radiohead sin nye forretningsmodell ser ut til å være en suksess ifølge Music Ally. Man kan selfølgelig diskutere hvorvidt Radiohead sin etablerte status i platebransjen kan ha [...]
October 19th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
[...] de buzz, du nouveau business model de l’industrie de la musique ou ce que vous voulez, les chiffres sont là et démontrent que l’opération a été un total [...]
October 19th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
[...] tanto speculare (ricordo una discussione animata da quinta), pare che siano uscite le statistiche definitive sull’album dei Radiohead uscito giusto giusto un [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 2:25 am
[...] fans bought 1.75 million In Rainbows CDs, as first reported by Music Ally, while 2001’s Amnesiac and 2003’s Hail To The Thief sold 900,000 and 990,000 CDs [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 10:53 am
[...] ladda ner fritt och betala frivillig summa för eller inte alls. Nu presenteras hur det hela gick ekonomiskt. Bra som det verkar. Heja, mer [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[...] Music Ally blog reported that Warner Chappell’s Head of Business Affairs Jane Dyball said that the digital [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
[...] par celmlaužiem. Viņi pirmie atļāvās publicēt savu albūmu ar nosacījumu, maksā-cik-gribi. Šeit maza analīzīte. Īsumā: The fact that Radiohead had made more money before ‘In Rainbows’ was [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
[...] Via Musically This entry was written by julien and posted on October 20, 2008 at 5:57 pm and filed under Quote. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment. « Danger, high voltage ! [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
People are now commenting, rightly in my view, that taking the licensing away from MCPS may ultimately have a very detrimental effect on collective licensing. I even wrote about this at the time to numerous parties, including MCPS, expressing potential concern.
http://www.musictank.co.uk/newsletters/editorial-1/musictank-lounge-right-to-reply
This model is fine for big publishers or big artists (a bit like the horrid 360 all income model). It doesn’t and will not suit most (smaller artists) who rely on collective licensing to get paid anything at all.
Or is this the end of collective licensing of publishing?
If it is left up to the big boys clearing everything on a case by case basis you will end up with similar situations to those happening with Youtube and Nokia “Comes with” and Myspace/music, all of which are not making it easy to collect or be represented as an independent label. And wouldn’t it be fairer if Warner’s were either all in MCPS, or all out of MCPS. Or is it fine to be out for Radiohead – which is easy to administer – but not for some new hopefuls on the first album commitment….?
Great. Wonderful for competition, not.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:13 pm
[...] The Music Ally Weblog had a fascinating and detailed piece this week on the results of Radiohead’s experiment with In Rainbows last year. The most basic fact is that, despite the fact that the album was released for free, there “were three million purchases of In Rainbows, including physical CDs, box-sets, and all downloads – including those from the band’s own website and from other digital music stores”, which is even more interesting when you consider that “their previous three albums sold in the low hundreds of thousands”. [...]
October 22nd, 2008 at 3:33 am
[...] Vínculos: Mashable (ver aquí) Musically (ver aquí) [...]
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:56 pm
[...] all of us should control our own product? But to make money, you probably already have to be a superstar [...]
October 24th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
[...] a fracasar y la otra mitad decía que “esto lo hacen porque quieren fama” la gente de Warner Chapel hizo públicos los números del experimento y, resumiendo, dió resultados muy buenos para [...]
October 27th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
[...] su fama y la fidelidad de sus fans. Pese a que la mitad de la industria decía que iba a fracasar, Warner Chapel hizo públicos los números del experimento los cuales fueron muy buenos para [...]
October 30th, 2008 at 8:03 am
[...] Music Ally ha i risultati dell’esperimento di vendita online dell’ultimo album dei Radiohead. In [...]
October 30th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
[...] Exclusive: Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pot of gold Music Ally reports "In Raibows" selling 1.75 million copies of the physical CD, 100.000 box sets, and 30,000 units on iTunes in the US in the first week of availability. The album was number 1 in both the UK and US for the first three months; it was played 17 million times on Last.FM , and even to this day it’s in the top 200 UK & US as far as sales of the physical CD go. (tags: Radiohead mobile free album) [...]
November 8th, 2008 at 8:29 am
[...] Music Alley Related PostsJoey Negro – Can’t Get High Without [...]
November 18th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
[...] [3] Radiohead – a year later – statistics and analysis http://musically.com/blog/2008/10/15/exclusive-warner-chappell-reveals-radioheads-in-rainbows-pot-of... [...]
November 18th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
[...] Jag har inte skrivit mycket om den lagen, men alla som känner mig borde fatta att jag är emot den. Och jag vill bara säga lite kort, till Py och WB och andra vänner i musikbranschen som verkar tycka det är okej att införa Gestapometoder i Sverige, att lagen inte på något sätt handlar om att upphäva upphovsrätten. Det är en obsolet lag som visserligen handlar om att bevaka enskildas upphovsrätt, men det finns andra sätt. Radiohead exempelvis har fattat grejen. [...]
December 31st, 2008 at 5:51 pm
[...] Só pra ilustrar melhor, eu roubei umas estatísticas do site Music Ally: [...]
January 9th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
[...] as a digital download that customers could order for whatever price they liked. That album made more money from the digital publishing before the physical release of the CD than the total money gained by [...]
January 19th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
well sell was success in an amount of 3M, was a good move to licensed all those properties own by them
January 19th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
well the stats are good in just a short period of time they already sell lots of cd album/imedia
February 28th, 2009 at 8:45 am
[...] http://musically.com/blog/2008/10/15/exclusive-warner-chappell-reveals-radioheads-in-rainbows-pot-of... [...]
March 31st, 2009 at 10:05 am
[...] revolution. On one hand, new digital distributions are profitable and working; for example, look at Radiohead’s numbers for In Rainbows. But as new business models are hard to pin down, businesses are still holding onto past [...]