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When Radiohead introduced their new album In Rainbows online with a pay-what-you-want deal, they were heralded as changing the way music is distributed online. Not having a label for their finished album, and knowing that the process of getting a label and producing the discs would finish well after the album was leaked onto the Internet, they chose to be proactive and offer In Rainbows for free (if you want).

Statistics showed the experiment wasn’t exceedingly profitable, although wasn’t much worse than the return they would have gotten on a traditional release. However, now frontman Thom Yorke is saying that it’s not something they would do again.

I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation. It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time.

A lot of people are now pretty angry at Radiohead, with CNET’s Greg Sandoval suggesting that Radiohead was merely “after publicity” and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor said it was a “marketing gimmick” since the 160 bps tracks were of poor quality and just a teaser for people to get the full album, and maybe make a dime doing it.

First of all, I honestly can’t tell any difference between 160 bps quality songs and those that are higher. If you played me ten songs that were 128, 192, and 320, I highly doubt I could identify which was which. I’d recommend trying out this test, which plays a 128 and 320 bps clip and see if you can tell the difference. Even if you get it right, it will be sheer luck.

Second, I take Radiohead at their word that they really wanted to try something different and see how it worked. Nobody had done this before, and as a fan, I was really overjoyed at it. It was a unique situation where they didn’t have a label, so they found a solution that was great for fans and for the band. To write it off as a marketing gimmick is cynical and lazy. Besides, what’s so bad about marketing gimmicks?

The fact is that for smaller bands looking to make it will have problems emulating Radiohead’s model. Making a great record requires resources. Radiohead, as a successful band, could do something like this, but smaller bands need capital to create a good product, and the Radiohead model lacks a good answer for unsigned bands.

Thanks to Stan Schroeder at Mashable and Greg Sandoval at CNET for the info.

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