Tropophilia

The music industry, if you haven’t heard, is undergoing some big time transformations. Late last year, Radiohead decided to self-release their new album. Online. For whatever price people wanted to pay. Including nothing. WTF, you ask? Indeed.

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke says in an interview with Wired that it was their manager’s idea, and that the band thought he was nuts. But they later realized that it not only worked out OK, but it was a little freeing as well.

It released us from something. It wasn’t nihilistic, implying that the music’s not worth anything at all. It was the total opposite. And people took it as it was meant. Maybe that’s just people having a little faith in what we’re doing.

Even though they could have bought it for free, a lot of people paid for the album anyway (Wired says 40% of downloaders paid an average of $6, while the rest took it for free. Radiohead has so far refused to release official numbers). Radiohead has since ended the download promotion, and has now released the albums through regular digital and physical channels.

Is this the future of music distribution? The album essentially becomes donationware that serves to hook fans to see the band live and buy other merchandise, including “limited edition” hard copies? Michael Arrington thinks so. He breaks it down:

The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies (meaning there is perfect competition and zero barriers to entry). Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero as more “competitors” (in this case, listeners who copy) enter the market.

And since nobody seems to really care about copyright anymore (see this interesting presentation by renowned law professor Lawrence Lessig for more on this), and Digitial Rights Management (DRM, the thing that only lets you play iTunes Music Store purchases on iTunes or your iPod) is all but dead, it seems like everything is in place for the price of music to fall towards zero. But will it? Arrington says music won’t be free anytime soon, because iTunes and others can still entice consumers to pay some minimal amount for service quality. But even then, will the business model Arrington proposes (recorded music being a marketing tool for performances and merchandies) work out for all artists? I’m not so sure. Neither is Yorke:

The only reason we could even get away with this, the only reason anyone even gives a shit, is the fact that we’ve gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place. It’s not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.

Not all music artists sell, or want to sell, merchandise. Indeed, not all artists can perform live (example: The Postal Service). Will artists really be willing to spend all that money and studio time to produce something that is just advertising, something that is just a hook? Forget about the business side. Is this the way we want music to be written and created?

So what happens? Sweet child, where do we go, where do we go now?

I’ll admit that I have no clue. I don’t have my head fully wrapped around all of this myself. But the business of music is changing. Technology will always find a way to jailbreak technical locks on music, and the industry can’t just keep suing forever. How does this end?

Image used under a Creative Commons license from Flicker user Slushpup.