In succession to [[Radiohead Says Name Your Own Price for New Album]], Chris “Longtail” Anderson also writes about [http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/10/radiohead-econo.html Radiohead Economics] on his blog.
In succession to [[Radiohead Says Name Your Own Price for New Album]], Chris “Longtail” Anderson also writes about [http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/10/radiohead-econo.html Radiohead Economics] on his blog.
I did some further analysis on this using Hitwise Internet usage data here: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2007/10/radiohead_freakonomics_and_fre_1.html
The main finding was that the people downloading the album from Radiohead’s site are not the same sort of people who download from stuff for free from the file sharing sites. This could mean one of two things for Radiohead – either they’ve managed to tap into the market of people who are willing to pay for the content and the honour systmem will see them good; or they’ve just started giving their music away for free to the very people that are usually prepared to pay for it. Hopefully Radiohead will release some data from this experiment and we’ll see which is true!
Robin Goad
Research Director, Hitwise