For Once, It’s Not About Games

So I’m sure you’ll have heard about Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. It’s exceptional not only because it’s been earning some pretty good reviews, but for their unique method of getting it out to the masses. You head over to their website, and choose to pay however much or little as you like, including paying nothing at all.

This is possibly one of the cleverest things to hit the music industry in years; let’s face it, with the innovation of digital music, most people have a lot of music on their computers which they haven’t strictly paid for. The record companies have adapted to this by grudgingly admitting their music to the likes of iTunes and Napster, and by suing the pants off anyone they can find downloading music.

Inherently, it’s a broken model. Rather than trying to move with the times the labels are trying to whack the brakes on and stuff the genie back into the bottle. There are a multitude of reasons as to why the big music label model is broken, too many to go into here, and that’s only partly because my cold fingers are making typing difficult.

Radiohead’s new model is likely to make them a really big bundle of cash. I’ve never bought a Radiohead album before, and I’ve just laid down £5 on their new album, just because that’s an amount of cash I feel comfortable semi-casually parting with. No doubt there are a lot of people like me who will make similar purchases. This translates into new fans, more bodies in their gigs, and gig ticket sales are a lot more profitable for the artist than the release of an album through a traditional retailer and label, both creaming off their profits.

Ok, so I lied. It’s a little about games. Games are in some ways having the same growing pains – where the big business is trying to hold on to world where their business models make sense, when the world is actually making them more irrelevant as time goes on. Both these media need pioneers in the digital space to sell direct to consumers without the middlemen.

They need to key into making the legitimate experience positive enough to outweigh the free-ness of the pirates. This is why all DRM schemes are inherently futile – they penalise the legitimate purchaser but don’t prevent the wide-scale distribution of music as CDs are still trivial to rip. Even with "protection" added to CD the work-arounds are nearly trivial.

Most people, when given the option, will choose "good" behaviour, like paying for music, over "bad" choices, like piracy, even with a slight disincentive to the good side. See games which offer you moral choices, like Black & White. If you offer them a service like Radiohead’s is, a lot of people will pay, even if it’s a fairly nominal amount. The key point is: as long as you’re covering your costs to keep the servers running, nominal payment is better than people just stealing it! The fans will still pay more, because they’re fans, and they will buy at full price anyway.

The logical thing to do is to provide (optional?) Bittorrent downloads, reducing the costs of distribution to an absolute minimum. Bittorrenting is already a valuable tool in the arsenal of the pirate – it would be wonderful for it also to be put towards more virtuous ends.