Picked up the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows, which went live today with a set-your-own price model.
The site takes forever to load (with multiple network drops), at least until you hit the secure check-out portion. I’m sure the site is getting slammed, since people can pay as little as they want to — for the record, I paid £2.50. My reasoning: An album on iTunes costs about 10 bucks US, and the artist usually only sees 10-20% of retail in royalties. I paid Radiohead $5.11 US (as of this morning’s exchange rate), which is 5x what they’d see on a low-end royalty deal (and more than double what they’d see on the high-end). I gladly paid this, because I know it went directly to the band.
So far, I’m liking what I hear. One thing I thought was odd, though — Radiohead tagged the MP3 files, but included no album art. So, for folks who want something, I did a quick screen-grab of the website, sized as an album cover, for you to add via iTunes:
