Maybe next time Radiohead can give the CDs away, too.
By that point, avid fans had already bought the album, and the average price paid nosedived as downloads became the domain of idly curious freeloaders.ĭyball also disclosed that the digital publishing income from Radiohead's pay-what-you-like downloads dwarfed all of the band's previous digital publishing income, and made a "material difference" to Warner Chappell's overall bottom line. Jane Dyball, Warner Chappell's Head of Business Affairs, said that the band and their management were monitoring the average price of pay-what-you-like downloads, with plans to end the service in anticipation of the album's iTunes release on December 10. Interestingly, it yielded higher digital album sales compared to a traditional. How come Pablo Honey is the third most selling Radiohead album online It seems like following their musical evolution is mostly the domain of dedicated fans and journalists, whereas for the public as a whole they're just a nostalgic 90's band. 100,000 of the purchases were fancy £40 "disc boxes", which alone makes for a handsome profit. We find that Radioheads PYOP offer had no effect on the subsequent CD sales. It's a smaller gap than I would have imagined.
This number comprises physical CDs, box sets, and every download (even £0.01 ones). He guessed that when royalties were combined with money earned from publishing, Radiohead saw between 3 and 5 for every album sale. The band likely negotiated a larger royalty rate than most performers earn. Radiohead have sold 3m copies of In Rainbows, according to Warner Chappell. He figures that in every year a Radiohead album was released, it was EMI's top-selling record. In fact, even before In Rainbows was available in shops, Radiohead had already earned more money from its online sale than they had earned – in all formats combined – from Hail to the Thief. Contrast this with sales figures from 2001's Amnesiac and 2003's Hail to the Thief, which as of late last year had sold 900,000 and 990,000 copies respectively, according to Hits Daily Double. In some of the first official figures to be released, Warner Chappell said that the CD version of In Rainbows has racked up 1.75m sales to date.
Warner Chappell, Radiohead's publishers, made the announcement in a keynote presentation at the You Are In Control conference in Iceland, as reported by Music Ally magazine. Forbes-RadioheadAlbumSales-640px Visual, Songwriting, Forbes, Radiohead, Dotted Line. No, even after In Rainbows was sitting on hard drives and iPods across the land, it still sold more CD copies than their previous two recent releases.
Radiohead's In Rainbows – an album that was freely available to download – has nevertheless sold more copies than either of the band's last two albums.Īnd we're not counting free or cheap downloads as equal to a full-value CD purchase.