Thom Yorke used BitTorent o distribute his new album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” (which I for one like a lot here) and it was downloaded 1.2M times. Figure two thirds of that were the free song and one third paid the six bucks. So approx quarter of a million punters paid six bucks each, giving Thom 1.5 million bucks of which he owes nobody anything except Bittorrent who are just doing file sharing for a fee… any questions?
If Yorke had sold 250,000 copies through a major label on Itunes, he would have gotten $25,000.
What this tells us is what I am sick and tired of writing: what is killing record sales is not streaming but pricing.
Thom is a talented fellow no doubt, but he isn’t THAT popular, and indeed, in 2014 he is something of a relic but he is popular enough to sell an estimatable 250K units at the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Thom was worried that his audience wouldn’t be tech savvy enough to figure it out but obviously they were indeed and really in 2014 it isn’t that difficult to figure out how to download an album.
Still, it takes a farsightedness and a sense of the possibilities, of a refusal to give away your stuff but awareness of its real value. You know how you can tell Thom isn’t fucking around? He didn’t price it at $5.99. The album, Yorke, found another way to make money and another way to play the game. He knew what he had and he did what he needed to do to make the money he was worth.
