Radiohead's Success

Thom Yorke reveals top digital sales

19 Dec 2007 - Thom Yorke's revealed that Radiohead have made more money from digital downloads of their new album 'In Rainbows' than digital sales of all the other Radiohead albums put together.

Radiohead has avoided questions about how much they made from the pay-what-you-like download of their seventh album, but talking to David Byrne for Wired.com, Thom's revealed that the album's been a moneyspinner for them:

"In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that's nuts. It's partly due to the fact that EMI wasn't giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff."

"If you're an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment." - Thom Yorke

Yorke explained that the pay-what-you-like idea was their manager Chris Hufford's: "It wasn't nihilistic, implying that the music's not worth anything at all, it was the total opposite. And people took it as it was meant. Maybe that's just people having a little faith in what we're doing."

"The only reason we could even get away with this, the only reason anyone even gives a sh*t, is the fact that we've gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place, it's not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We're out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do?"

Thom also aknowledged that new bands couldn't follow their pay-what-you-like model - but he still had some advice for them, saying: "Don't sign a huge record contract that strips you of your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero." Adding "If you're an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment."


Ruth Barnes