Bottom Of The Barrel

What is an album worth part 2

Last month I commented that Radiohead's pay what-you-think-it's-worth approach it's 7th studio album could give the record industry "some insight into buyers habits, preferences and true sense of the value of a digital album." While the band has yet to release details of how their experiment has fared, the company comScore has published a study with their own findings. The company monitors computer users' online behavior of people who are voluntarily part of their massive 2 million user database. The study reports that between Oct. 1 and Oct. 29, about 1.2 million people visited the Web site the band set up for fans to download the album. Their analysis reports:

- 62 percent of the people paid nothing for the album
- The remaining 38 percent paid an average of $6
- 40 percent U.S. residents paid an average of $8.05
- 36 percent of the fans outside the U.S. paid an average of $4.64

What does it all mean? Well first this data shows that digital consumers would still rather pay nothing than anything at all - of course we don't need some fancy monitoring system to know that. Second this definitely shows that if the industry is interested in album sales, not singles, than the 10 bucks that is currently being charged for an entire album might be a bit high. Last we see that US music fans are more willing to pay for an album and willing pay almost twice as much as people in other countries. No margin of error was giving for the above data, so take it all with a grain of salt, but one thing is for sure - it can't be ignored.

posted by TheWino @ 7:11 AM