Love them or hate them, you have to give major credit to Radiohead for the distribution model they’ve chosen for their newest album, In Rainbows. Plenty of sites have been allowing you to buy downloadable music in one form or another, but with the ease of file-sharing, I’ve only ever indulged in using eMusic once (when given a big bonus incentive) as a way to download especially obscure music. It’s always struck me as a little bit dumb paying $10 for an album on iTunes to get the music in a proprietary format with none of the liner notes and artwork. Radiohead, however, have taken that digital distribution model one step further - not only is there no middle-man (not even you, Apple), there’s no fixed price. You go to their website, get what you want, and pay what you can. Even nothing.

The beauty of the situation is, when people feel like they’re being treated well, more often than not they’ll return the favour. Overwhelmingly, people are still paying, even given the choice not to - on the first day, the album sold 1.2M copies at an average price of £4. That’s a handy $10M straight into their pocket - they’d have needed to sell 10 times that many albums at a regular price to make that kind of profit if they’d signed with a label. And that figure says nothing of the 700,000 orders for their deluxe discbox (which comes with a CD, 2 vinyls, and a bunch of art, lyrics, and extras). That one sells for £40 - more than $50M!

I paid £2, plus a £0.45 download fee. $5 for a new album, which downloaded in less than a minute, works for me. The album’s not their greatest, but whatever. It’s the thought that counts. And the supreme satisfaction of fucking the recording industry even harder as it continues its slow, Hindenburg-like descent into irrelevance.

…Maybe not the greatest analogy, though. Zeppelins look like they might be coming back, after all.