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Of Rainbows And Freeloaders II: The Trials Of Tardust
AngelHedgie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A while back, I made this thread, which posited that the number of people who just took Radiohead's new album In Rainbows online was not exactly a good sign for the "new music economy". I was told by various posters that I was, well, an idiot.
After reading this, I'm starting to think that I'm not.
To summarize, Trent Reznor released Saul Williams' newest album in two formats - a free 192kbps MP3 and a $5 320kbps offering. Today, he released the numbers:
Reznor himself isn't sure what to make of this:
Personally, I think this vindicates my earlier observations - reliance on a donation model does not appear to be sustainable in the long run.
After reading this, I'm starting to think that I'm not.
To summarize, Trent Reznor released Saul Williams' newest album in two formats - a free 192kbps MP3 and a $5 320kbps offering. Today, he released the numbers:
- 154,449 people downloaded the album.
- Of those, only 28,322 ponied up the five-spot.
- In comparison, approximately 34,000 people purchased Williams' 2004 album in stores.
- The album was completely funded online - the purchases go to pay for the production of the album
Reznor himself isn't sure what to make of this:
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but that percentage—primarily from fans—seems disheartening.
Personally, I think this vindicates my earlier observations - reliance on a donation model does not appear to be sustainable in the long run.
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Besides that, I'm sure a lot of people don't really find any tangible reason in paying for what they can easily and legally get for free, whether that's from bystander effect, pure apathy or whatever.
28,322 * $5 = $141,610
34,000 * $15 (a fair average) = $510,000, of which the artist only gets 10% so = $51,000
so Saul Williams made more on this album than on his last album even though more people bought that one.
Except you forgot point 4. Which completely invalidates your math.
Without telling us exactly how much they lost on recording/manufacturing fees, the info is useless.
.....Wait a sec.
Who the fuck is Saul Williams anyway?
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
These two products aren't equivalent for quite a few reasons, but this is a big one.
Which could be $100,000 or it could be $20,000.
So what you're saying is these numbers are meaningless.
Aha. Ahahaha.
At least Radiohead gave me a choice. I paid them $2 for mp3s, and I only did that because they have album credibility. $5 for something without packaging and in a lossy format can go kiss itself.
I wonder what is the ratio of NIN fans to Saul fans in the original number, as they tend to play rather different kinds of music, and i could see a lot of Reznor fans (the bigger fan pool of the two) not digging a hip-hop act.
One way to look at it, is that they got out the album to many more people than through regular channels. But if you read in between the lines in the original article, they didnt make much profit off of it.
also:
I believe you could also choose to get it in FLAC
Ah, now see, this information was not in the OP. That changes my opinion somewhat. If they sold it at a fair price with some nifty good-res PDF artwork, then they were offering a good downloadable product, assuming they weren't charging an arm and a leg for something that is still ultimately a virtual item.
Thinking about the numbers themselves, the first album sold 34,000 copies over three plus years and NT sold 28,000 copies in three months or so. Sales are weighted towards the release date, but I'll bet a few thousand copies of the last album were sold in the past two years. I don't know what kind of marketing the previous album had, but this one had none aside from word of mouth. Also, the number of 18% having paid doesn't take into account those who downloaded the free version and went back to pay for it later, so the 18% figure could be significantly lower than the actual number.
I certainly wouldn't call this experiment a failure, but I wouldn't call it a success either.
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
(28 000 isn't that much less than 34 000 even so I guess a couple of thousands who bought his last album realized it sucked and stopped caring)
edit: ah, so they offered it in a better format, well, nevermind that part then.
Ah, yes, it also came with a high rez PDF booklet (printable, I presume).
I think that the initial reasoning was that most people rip their CDs anyway, so having the end product read for you at one third the price would be a desirable item. From a value standpoint, I thought it was great. FLAC quality, no DRM, PDF booklet and at the price of a McDonalds meal, where all the money goes to an artist I enjoy.
Well, then I take it you laugh at the iTunes store? This is far better value than you see there.
The only reason I'd still buy CDs is so I can have DRM free music, and so I have starting material of high quality. This deal would give me the former, and probably the latter as well to my ears.
You would be correct, to a degree. They offer a hell of a service, but it's not for me. Most people are fine with mp3s/m4as and sort of shrug off audiophiles (boy, do I wish there was a less loaded term than that), and lossy files obviously require less bandwidth than lossless ones, so it's not like they're making bad decisions here. I'd just rather have pricing that reflects the final product, as well as the option to buy something that is as close as possible to the physical album.
A product distributed under an alternate sale model can still be a poor seller. If I tried to sell Waterworld .mpg files under the same donation system, one would be unwise to say that the model itself was flawed because the tubes weren't jammed by eager Kevin Costner fans.
I wouldn't deem those failures either.
So is this some kind of stunning success? No, but then I havn't listened to the record, it might very well be that it's A not spectacularily good and so the reason there is no massive new audience is there "shouldn't" be one, B a niche genre, if you release an avant garde Jazz album online don't expect downloads in the millions, Cs it's the music industry, it's flooded with talent.
But why would it be a failure? He quite possibly made more money from this record than from his previous.
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
As an artist who wasn't signed with a large record label, it's a fair chance that his type of music is fairly niche. Add in no marketing budget and you're firing a shotgun into a large lake and hoping for every fish to turn bellyup so you can pluck them out of the water with ease.
Also, if Trent was expecting that a whole bunch of people were going to fork out money for something they didn't like just to support the artist, then he was essentially hoping for skewed numbers that would potentially give a false impression to future artists as to whether this is a reasonable means of distribution?
Just a thought, but who's Saul Williams? I'm no music buff but I know who Trent Reznor is, but Saul Williams? Interesting thought here but if you're just doing your basic tracking or downloads and sales that won't always give you the full story. Context is everything. Imagine little Billy hears about this, but has no idea, like me, who Saul Williams is or what this is all about, but he sees the free download option. Little billy downloads the album to see what it is, likes it, and then buys a copy.
The stats would record one download AND one sale, but in reality what happened was there really was just one sale, since he eventually purchased the copy (since in a digital medium there is no direct loss only lost sales.) Which means that in actuallity it could be anywhere between the reported 154,449 and 92,127 ACTUAL downloads taking place (a download being an actual lack of sale.) That has to say something, plus since this is a collaberation there's not as close a comparable analog as say, Radiohead would have. Radiohead could compare their sales to their last albums and come up with some more direct comparisons. Unless Saul Williams' last album was also a Trent Reznor collaberation, that'd be much harder here.
One third thought. I knew about Radiohead's album giveaway, but I never heard about this collaberation here. I think advertising and information is key. Why would someone who doesn't know anything about Saul Williams, or his music, blindly up and buy a copy first without downloading?
Interesting stuff none the less, but there are more variables at play here then at first glance. It'd be nicer if we could actually measure things in context, but then if we could do that, the RIAA and MPAA would actually have to start reporting real piracy statistics, which are probably a lot smaller than their nicely made up ones.
If only bands with huge fan bases can sustain themselves on this delivery method, then the method fails as anything other then a niche, freak occurrence.
No it doesn't.
Yes, they have to pay for studio time, etc. But for an indie guy like Saul that can't be much. Bands just starting out usually make their first CD using money from their own pockets.... and these people aren't rich. Digitial distribution is dirt cheap to do. Bandwidth costs scale as their downloads do. They are still gonna make more money this way AND what is even more important then that, they will still OWN THEIR WORK.
I think I posted this essay by courtney love last time but here it is again: http://cdbaby.net/courtney
Very insightful, it goes into how little artist get paid in the traditional system. But she also (about 3/4 down) talks about giving the music away and letting people pay what they think it's worth.
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
I don't see any reason at all why bands with small fan bases couldn't sustain themselves using this method. In fact it's better for them because they are making it easier for someone to start to listen. It's like myspace. I hear about a band in the post-hardcore thread, head over to their myspace page and check them out for free. "Hey, these Crime in Stereo guys are pretty fucking great!". Now if I could get the whole album from there, I'd send them 5-10 bucks. Yeah, not everyone would do that, but that's ok because enough people would. They still come out ahead of the alternative.
The only groups that would be in trouble with this system would be the larger groups that sell records based on their name and the marketing behind it. A couple hits and ten filler tracks wouldn't work very well in this new system.
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
I don't see "word of (internet) mouth" as a viable sole source of advertising for a band. At least, not one that wants to become a big band.
Bands that we consider "big" probably won't exist in the new system, because there just wouldn't be the marketing money behind them that you need to get there. I'm talking about the manufactured pop groups here.
But why couldn't a band get really popular through word of (internet) mouth?
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
I don't know about their site, but the big thing here people need to look at isn't really the percentage of sales versus the percentage of downloads but more how much they earned. In this case, yeah, maybe 141K might not have been enough for production of a major album but we need to look at this here more critically but all things considered there are a lot of bands that'd have been able to record on a lower budget and would kill for that kind of money. You have to establish and market yourself in any business, and the internet means they have the ability to promote themselves outside of established channels, that says nothing for how effectively they do that or even how to effectively do that. It's like saying PHP is horribly insecure when really it's just the fact that most people make scripts for it and don't think very much about security. I can't speak personally for Saul Williams but whatever the case, I'd say maybe he's not doing such a good job?
How are people going to get to know the band, its music, etc. without samples, info and such being widespread? Maybe right now he's marginal but maybe if he markets himself well the next one will sell even better? There are so many factors at play here and I think it's a falsehood to blindly take downloads out of context and then compare them against sales as some sort of omen that it's going to fail. Another thing to remember is that downloads aren't supposed to replace everything, just the distribution method, AKA: CDs. Most musicians don't even make money on their CDs outside of the few mega-stars of music, most bands make money on concerts and merchandise.
We have a new method here, and things are off to a rocky start, a lot of experimentation and trial and error needs to take place before the perfect balance can be found. That said, it's silly to argue that it's all over after two attempts occur.
I take it you mean that the manufactured pop groups wouldn't take part in this system, cause it would be pretty unrealistic to expect the big money making side of the music industry to disappear completely.
Also, most music buyers don't tend to trawl through forums and messageboards looking for new bands to listen to, and I doubt they'd start any time soon.
Yeah, that second quote pretty much covers it.
any band besides those as large as radiohead does, sadly, benefit from the corporations advertising dollars. until that isn't true anymore, they will be there.
internet in theory makes you not need that dollar, except as was said earlier, not everyone is on message boards or music sites reading/chatting about music all the time.