Radiohead’s next album, In Rainbows, is complete and coming out Oct. 10 in digital form before coming out as a double-CD/double-12-inch box on Dec. 3, a beat-the-leakers move that recalls both Stars’ three-months-early digital distribution of their album In Our Bedroom After The War and Matador Records’ Buy Early Get Now program. People who pony up the £40 ($81.18 as of this writing) for the deluxe edition (packaging above) will automatically have access to the download, but those who just want the files on their hard drive are being allowed to go the “pay what you like” route, an art-museumy move that inspired former Idolator guestblogger Eric Harvey to coin the should-be-used-by-everyone term “lossy leader.”
Apparently shoppers can pay as little as £0.01 ($0.02 thanks to the free-falling dollar) for the album, although there’s a £0.45 ($0.91) surcharge tacked on to every order. So how much will you pay for the download if you decide to go the physical-copy-free route–and if you can actually get through the site, which has been hit with huge lag times thanks to every Pitchfork devotee flooding it with requests?
You know, no one has questioned what this “surcharge” is for. It’s interesting, because they don’t really have any overhead, except for maybe a dude or two to run the site for them.
Thinking out loud here – CDs in England can cost as low as 10 pounds or so. This means that royalties (if you get them) are usually about 10% or so of that list price – 1 pound. That’s pretty close to the surcharge. And because a whole wack of folks are going to pay much more than nothing for the CD, they will probably get much more in royalties than they would get through a record company. In other words, this will make Radiohead more money than they already do.
SFist: SFist Mail: Stop Using “the” Before Freeway Number “a byproduct of the enormous mental space freeways occupy within the mind of the average Los Angeleno…It’s part of their local idiom. It’s not part of ours because we don’t spend so much of our lives on them. (Shut up, Contra Costa.)
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