Floating Data

When it was time to release their seventh studio album, In Rainbows, alternative rock band Radiohead decided to do something rather unusual for a band of their standing.

Abandoning more conventional release formats, Thom Yorke and the rest of the band decided to offer the album out to the public as a digital download only, distributed from their own website in October 2007, not to be released as a standard CD until the end of the year (and then still under their own license). In other words, they cut the record labels out of the process entirely. The most interesting aspect of the release, however, was something else; there was no fixed price for the album. In fact it was free, if you so wished. When visiting the website, customers were prompted to decide for themselves what price they saw fit for In Rainbows before downloading it.

What pushed Radiohead, whom before In Rainbows had released six albums through the record company EMI in conventional manners, to change their tactics so dramatically? The band’s divorce from the record industry (they wanted to, quote, say ‘Fuck you’ to the business model itself) seem to touch at the very core of the Media Convergence era of today.

As Benkler (2006) points out, we are increasingly living in a networked information economy. Physical capital and infrastructure is becoming less of a determinant for success. Instead, individuals can seek market opportunities in a society of open sharing, unconstrained by traditional investment and production standards. And this is exactly what Radiohead did, asking why anyone need a record label in the first place. Furthermore, as they reasoned that their previous four records had all been leaked anyway, they simply decided to leak the next one themselves, only this time with the option of actually paying for it.

In the long battle between record companies and filesharers, Radiohead is, in a way, siding with the latter. In this they are not alone; Russell, Ito, Richmond, and Tuters (in Varnelis, ed, 2008) speak of the widespread opinion of the music industry as a corrupt exploiter of both artists and consumers. By supporting one of the most immediate threats to the industry, legitimate spreading, Radiohead fit Jenkin’s (2006) description of Collaborationists (p. 206). This view embraces network participation from consumers, and what better way to do this than to hand over the monetary decision to the fans themselves and say; you decide. This type of Viral Marketing assumes that the consumers are the most influential in building brands, or in this case, a rock band. This does not mean that Radiohead is a pro bono band. Rather, they accept what Ito et al. (2008) call a transition from a push to a pull ecology, where the fans set the terms of their own engagement. By paying, you support the band, simple as that. One could write a whole research paper on how human behavior and ethics play into this decision, but for the purpose of this post, it is simply worth noting that the strategy was a success. In Rainbows brought in more money than the previous two albums, which were released through EMI, despite the voluntary payment option. Apparently, the distribution method appealed to the fans, who paid $6 on average for the album. Radiohead thus gained by excluding the record company as an owner and distributor all together.

But what are the consequences of this break down of traditional authority structure? The difficulty in answering this question shows that it is indeed a so called ‘hard case’. Jenkins (2006) speaks of an ”alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream media”, and if this is alarming, certainly Radiohead’s deviation is a positive thing, and we should have every artists simply distributing their own music. The truth is probably more nuanced. Jenkins also points out that both corporate and bottom-up (consumer driven) convergence can be beneficial. They can reinforce each other, resulting in more rewarding relations between the two. The implication in this case, therefore, is that the record industry is likely to adapt to the actions of bands like Radiohead, and in the end we might all be better off. If the industry indeed is corrupt and exploitative, such forced change is certainly a good thing. But it does not mean that the record label industry should be terminated all together (artists can earn money without it, right?). As Ito et al. (2008) point out, a worst case scenario is a fragmentation of both of common culture and beneficial standards if professional commercial media were to disappear entirely. This shows us that there might also be something to lose by dismissing the traditional music industry, that some aggregated value exists there that might be hard to fully substitute in our new, open sharing economy.

In an expanding user-generated culture, the case of Radiohead’s In Rainbows can certainly serve as a beacon of hope for aspiring artists; not only can you be ”discovered” on sites such as Youtube and Myspace, which has happened again and again, but you can also successfully monetize on your work without the aid of the record industry. To offer a product for free, but with a note attached saying ”pay accordingly”, is certainly confusing to any traditional economist. How do you draw a Supply-and-Demand diagram of such a market? This is an exciting development. However, instead of portraying such development as the beginning of the end of major labels, which recent outbursts such as this one from Thom Yorke would indicate, I’d rather subscribe to the notion of positive convergence to come, from all sides. The bottom line is that success stories such as In Rainbows challenge the traditional ways we think of music distribution and how to make money in the music industry. Any media convergence we might expect out of such challenges is likely to take place among both corporate as well as grassroot, bottom-up, producers.

(Radiohead released their eight album in February 18, 2011, again self-published and initially only in digital format, but this time at a fixed price of $9 dollars.)

References:

• Benkler, Yochai, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 6-7
• Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old Media and New Media Collide (New York: New York University press, 2006), 17-19
• Varnelis, Kazys, Networked Publics (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2008)

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