Radiowar

Drums, please…… The guns are out: iconic Radiohead released their latest album for free with the hope that people would pay something for it. I would call that busker-style pricing. You park yourself on a strategic corner, open the guitar case in front of you, throw in some sad, old coins, and you sing for whatever money is tossed at you…. The Radioheads thought they were proving the industry wrong, I guess expecting that the “goodness” in fans would set a price that would make everyone happy… Apparently, the tops people paid for the album was two quid… most geezers just got it for free and strolled into the sunset.

But the record label has not sat around festering hateful thoughts with a you’ve-been-dumped attitude. EMI has new controlling owners, remember? a private equity fund. For those who cannot read between the lines, these are the guys you don’t mess with… And boy, did it show: EMI has just released a special USB stick containing all of the band’s back catalogue. You wanted digitalised music? Here you go, on a Radiohead bear-designed 40Gb sticky… at £80 quid the puppet…

Now, that’s where I sense they’ve missed the boat. Who’s got £80 quid for old albums that you either (a) you already own, (b) you can buy online for less (c) you can buy for even less on the highstreet (the ones you don’t have)?

Pricing is the mother of all evils where it comes to digital content. What’s the added value to something that is just invisible bites? And here, for back catalogue bites, not even unreleased tunes?

I don’t see the iPhone queues here…

My price suggestion: £45

Why? It’s a ballpark figure that enters the lifestyle pricetag of “stuff I don’t need but I can splash on”. This, in marketing terms, is how we price for this segment of the population: people in their late twenties (the average age of a Radiohead fan) whose average salary allows them to, let’s say, “throw away” a specific amount of money without too much suffering at the bank account level. In retail, you go for volume, specially if you are selling “old catalogue stuff”….

4 comments November 12th, 2007