In Black or In Red? In Rainbows! (or; The Yeasayers)

We have seen many different opinions about Radiohead's "pay what you want" option, implemented by the band for their 2007 album In Rainbows. Bono thought it was brave, Trent Reznor thought it was insincere. Now we finally look at how successful Radiohead's self-released album was in retrospect six years later.


One thing we can say for sure is: In Rainbows was extremely popular. There are a number of possibilities for this. First of all, In Rainbows was generally considered to be a better album than its predecessor Hail to the Thief, which even the band complained was not as polished as their other albums. This may be why, as NME reported, "it [In Rainbows...] 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".

Given the exceptional circumstances of the release of In Rainbows, we can probably go further than "it was a good album". Steve Gottlieb, the president of TVT Records, said in TIME Magazine (which I'm re-quoting from vulture.com):

"To the extent Radiohead still has a significant audience in its 30s and 40s, there's a bigger audience of those people who will still pick up something at Best Buy or don't want to bother with figuring out how to go to a Radiohead Website and track it down."

Indeed it may be possible that Radiohead's use of the internet was too early for its time. One should remember that Radiohead began their career in the late eighties, so it's entirely possible that many of their fans are not as comfortable using new digital technology or social media. However, a background in Radiohead's history will prove this more unlikely than one might think at first. Since the late nineties, Radiohead have a had a large presence online. The band has had complete control over their website radiohead.com since its inception and has used it as a means of communicating directly with their fans (Radiohead keep an archive of their old websites here). Another option suggested in the Vulture article is that many fans wanted "a physical, archival high-fidelity master recording". This ties into an idea discussed in the previous post, that people who want more content will pay more money. As can be seen from the picture below, In Rainbows was not just released as a digital download.

This is a picture of the limited edition "discbox" of In Rainbows which was released along with a regular CD months after the "pay what you want" experiment. While the majority of people downloaded the album from torrents, a strong minority opted to pay for the physical version of the album, for aesthetics or just for familiarity and ease of use. Contrary to what everybody in the music industry thought, Radiohead proved that fans were, under some circumstances, willing to pay more for music.



The advert above shows Radiohead's interest in do-it-yourself culture.

So what happened exactly? Radiohead's 2007 record sold less than their previous ones, but made more money than all of them combined. In the next post we will try to draw a conclusion as to whether Radiohead's "pay what you want" experiment ultimately payed off.