Music Ally

Music biz consultant Keith Jopling has taken a new look at Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, which has been regularly hailed as a groundbreaking release strategy. He poses the question of why it didn’t then catch on with other bands? He points out that U2 could have followed suit, but chose a traditional mainstream media blitz plus CD release instead. “With Spotify, We7, Yahoo, AOL, Myspace and others (Twitter if we must), we surely have now mass market platforms to rival the old guard media,” writes Jopling. “Surprising then, how many established artists are not taking these platforms seriously. Is it a lack of belief, a lack of interest? Or is it that the old media platforms are better connected to music buying audiences rather than simply music listening or music-social audiences?”

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.

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The MCPS-PRS Alliance has been doing some number-crunching on how Radiohead’s `In Rainbows’ was shared on BitTorrent, in partnership with analysis firm BigChampagne. The topline finding is that despite being heavily pirated – 2.3 million BitTorrent downloads in its first 24 days on sale – the band still cashed in, with the album topping the charts in the UK and US, and a sellout global tour. (more…)