So, I just spent some time walking around a beautiful city.  Paris is beautiful, and the people have been very kind.  It's just about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Very cold.

It's been some time since Radiohead released their album free of charge online.  I, of course, immediately wanted to comment on the experiential marketing aspects of it, but I was more interested to see what would come next, and what it would all mean.

I think that I've seen more than I expected -- way more!

Just to recap - the band Radiohead released their new album for free.  They then released the album in stores.

What happened?  Radiohead challenged an entire model. A model that has existed since the first records spun around the first record players and people paid for the privilege to listen.

Here's an excerpt from techconsumer.com:

According to a study (by a third party, comScore), only 38% of downloaders paid something while the 62% majority paid nothing. And of those paying, most paid less than $4. While it was fun to speculate on what this could mean for the music industry, turns out any speculation was based on more speculation (comScore's). Here's what Radiohead had to say: "In response to purely speculative figures announced in the press regarding the number of downloads and the price paid for the album, the group's representatives would like to remind people that it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales. However, they can confirm that the figures quoted by the company comScore Inc. are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project."

OK. Back to my train of thought and experiential marketing :)  So, as anyone could have guessed there were disputes about the success of Radiohead's social experiment.  But, did anyone see what was to come next?

Excerpt from Spinner.com:

In Rainbows, the first release by Radiohead on Dave Matthews' ATO label in the U.S., has debuted on the album charts at No. 1. While the band attaining the top spot for the first time since 2000's 'Kid A' is a newsworthy achievement in itself, it's all the more remarkable when you consider that the band had made the album available as a digital download in October on a pay-what-you-wish basis.

The British group's unorthodox music distribution scheme for the critically lauded 'In Rainbows' was scoffed at in many quarters. Yet since the album's official Jan. 1 release date, Radiohead have sold 121,000 hard copies of a record for which some fans paid a dollar or even less as a pre-release download. By some estimates, the album sold in the vicinity of a million copies in its three months as a digital release. This ultimately chart-topping strategy comes off as a sharp rebuke of the existing distribution model of the major labels Radiohead bypassed in the dissemination of their seventh album.
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So, what does this say? The band experimented, and then cleaned up via the traditional sales channel.  How could you possibly explain this? What does it mean, and how can it be explained?

It says that there are all kinds of people in this world. :)  I mean this in more ways than one.  There are people that are willing to pay for something offered for free if that something has value to them, while others will simply take it.  They probably wouldn¹t even say thank you.  This was what was really tested in Radiohead's great experiment, but it also really highlighted the fact that people have an aversion to change (good or bad - any change), have different adoption rates, and varied consumption patterns.

How could an album be #1 on the charts after it had been given away for a while?  It can make a good case that a lot of people have still not adopted the technology that enabled them to download the music for free - or it could mean something else.  All of the free PR that the album got still didn't drive some people online to download the album.  This would have signaled a change in their behavior. These people still wanted the comforting feeling of holding that plastic wrapped CD tightly in their hands for their exciting march to the cash register.  

And now I'm back to one of my favorite points: it takes a lot to change behavior.  Free or not - some folks waited to hold it in their hands and make it #1 on the Billboard charts.

Don't get me started on what Nine Inch Nails did with their latest album release. :)

Out to the Cafe I go… :) Just felt the need to rant.

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