Radiohead is doing what Peter Gabriel has done with respect to his next album - take away the middleman and become a stakeholder in his own music. Altho Gabriel is partnering with a distributor, who has no input in the process of making music. This way, the musician assumes much of the risk and reaps virtually all of the reward.

If enough artists follow their lead, it could re-democratize the music industry - or rather, make it less an "industry" than a grass-roots revival.

The record company covers all sorts of cost that now have to come out of the band's take,

Not as much as you'd think. The record company takes most of it back before it starts paying the band. It's called "recouping."

And I make nearly 70 cents a download. There is hardly any barrier to selling stuff there and on the new Amazon store. It is a great business model for the indie artist.

The major labels that bitch about iTunes also make a business of taking money and screwing people over. If anyone is surprised by this now, they are an idiot. Radiohead was in a bad deal with EMI, period. They boycotted iTunes not because of their fans but because they weren't getting a good cut. It's a tad bit duplicitous. BUT bully on them for dropping out of the current industry and making up a new one. Pretty great.

--biggray

Sounds about fair to me.

I paid 10 UK pounds, so about $20, because I feel that a Radiohead album is worth at least that. I hope that they publish statistics, the way that Jane Siberry (Issa) does at her music store. I think the best part about her store is seeing that the average paid price for a song is higher than the suggested retail price. That means that her fans respect her enough to pay more, because they know what goes in to making music. I hope that kind of responsible listenership continues in all realms of music.

As a musician this is equivalent to the $5 I charge for my band's CDs catscientist.com

Radiohead rules! - Cisco

Radiohead are in my top 10 current artists & I forked over the 40 quid, which is $81 + change Cdn$. It's a bit expensive - 40 Euro would've been more like it, but I imagine it might eventually be a collector's item of sorts or I'll give it to my son when he gets a bit older. I'm glad to support an uncompromising, progressive band even if they don't need my money.

I paid roughly 10 bucks because this is the coolest thing I've seen an artist do in years. It's about time the music industry - which is really nothing to do with "music", it's all "industry" - has to face up to the fact that musicians are sick and tired of being screwed trying to sell their own wares. And, we, as consumers, ought to do whatever we can to make sure our hard-earned dollars are going to the musicians, not the middlemen who rake in the big bucks.

I paid 5 quid, which in dollars ($10).

Figure thats' about the same as Amazon and they get all of it, which they should in an ideal world. I like this.

I intended to pay 7 US, which would be somewhere around middle ground for the product at emusic and itunes, but the final confirmation page wasn't supported in Safari and having received no email confirmation, I can't be certain my order went through. I agree with other posts about the clunkiness of the order page, but support, in theory, the effort of "direct to consumer" delivery, which is why I attempted to order in the first place (that, and Radiohead is one of the few bands worth buying without reading a review or hearing a track).

I paid 3 pounds + 45 pence for their processing. My wife lives in London, so with the high costs there, I have come to think of the pound and dollar being about the same. So, had this been in the US, I would have paid $3. BTW - I made the purchase before I saw the $1.50 figure you laid down as what they need to clear.

I've long defended my downloading by claiming that the bands didn't get enough of the sale price of a CD, and the industry's cut was going into churning out the next Britanny Spears. Its a self-serving argument because I'm justifying not paying for music, but I think it holds water. The current model the music industry is using is broken, and giving them more money is just going to prolong their inevitable slide into irrelevance.

A capitalist system - of which I'm largely in support of - dictates that a company will prosper if it's able to sell a good or a service at a price that reflects the demand. The music industry is trying to spin P2P as stealing, but the reality is that they're just trying to defend a monopolistic, anti-capitalist market strategy to keep the dollars flowing into their pockets. Since music is essentially free, sell me a service that means I don't have to jump around Bit Torrent sites wondering about the integrity and quality of what I'm downloading. Sell it for a reasonable price, where the artist is getting paid a reasonable cut, and you have a business model that might be profitable.

Record labels added value when recording, promotion and distribution required huge capital investment. With the advent of cheap, high-quality recording hardware and software, as well as P2P and decentralized information systems that are just coming into their own, the recording industry has ceased to add value. Sure, they claim that they help new bands get established, but the facts don't support these claims. The industry has manufactured one-hit wonders at the expense of independent and original artists so they can realize economies of scale. They have hurt music, not helped it.

Radiohead might not be the first, they might owe much of their commercial success to the traditional model, but still, this is going to change the rules of the game. Who knows where this will end up, but even if they don't make a penny at this, its going to change the debate, this will have a huge impact.

In comments most people have focused on how the $1.50 figure is too low, because of the additional costs. But the total revenue is: cost per download * # of downloads. The biggest obvious difference isn't what the band will net per album, its whether the number of downloads will be significantly larger than if people were forced to pay $15. If Radiohead ends up making more money than they would have with EMI, even Metallica is going take notice.