As a business, why should Radiohead be obliged to answer any of these questions (pr costs? manufacturing costs? bandwidth costs?) One might imagines, that if they’re running their band as a business, that they’d have a fair idea of profit and loss, margins (on things like the box-set) and overall costs. Name another business that should be expected to reveal that kind of info?

As if to illustrate this point, I doubt VERY MUCH that Radiohead had ANY IDEA what the total earnings of HTTT were, given EMI’s (and most labels) accounting magic tricks. So the earnings were, undoubtedly, based on an improvement on their royalty take home. NIN’s discbox earned Mr. Reznor more than he’d ever made from a label – for good reason.

And these questions are incredibly short-sighted. The most innovative part of this whole deal was the fact that Radiohead and Warner/Chappell circumvented MCPS/PRS (automatically adding an extra 15% on all performance income received by the band/publisher).

Not only that, unlike any other record, they OWN the record – and will received 100% of any license of the sound recording (as opposed to NOTHING on any deal signed on one of their EMI owned albums) And that’s inperpetuity.

There were definitely costs that the band would have to absorb in this model that they traditionally would defer to EMI, but as a business decision it was an incredibly wise (and profitable) one.

And more importantly, there is NO REASON given the model that any band with any kind of viable income at the moment couldn’t go the same route.

But yes, In Rainbows is WAY better than Hail to the Thief.

Yes.

It sold out.

And now I’m going to get a thousand people disagreeing with me.