Radiohead Made $6-$10 Million on Initial Album Sales

[SetoTK]

Estimates: Radiohead Made $6-$10 Million on Initial Album Sales
By Eliot Van Buskirk

Thom Yorke's representative told me that the band have "decided not to give out any figures" for sales of Radiohead's In Rainbows album, but that isn't stopping people from making their best guesses based on what little information is available.

The Seminal estimates that Radiohead sold about $10 million-worth of albums as of 10/12, assuming that their source was correct that approximately 1.2 million people downloaded the album from the site, and that the average price paid per album was $8 (we heard that number too, but also heard that a later, more accurate average was $5, which would result in $6 million revenue instead).

Meanwhile, Forbes and BigChampagne revealed that on the first day the album was available, 240K people downloaded it for free over BitTorrent, and that over the following days an average of 100K people per day did the same, for a total of over 500K BitTorrent downloads over the initial week of its release. It appears that even though the album was available for free on InRainbows.com, plenty of people preferred to use BitTorrent rather than Radiohead's site, which required an email registration (although some of those BitTorrent downloads may have been the result of slowdowns on the ordering site).

We're working on getting some sales numbers through another channel, and will post those if/when we can.

Source :: http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/10/est ... radio.html

[SetoTK]

This just goes to show that a more open approach to music can do,

I bet if they hadn't done this they would never have sold that much, or even have made that much

But well nice to see artists are taking the approach that the RIAA is to stupid to

[froggyboy604]

That's great that they made so much. Anyone know how was the sound quality of their online album since typically a lot of music sold on online download stores aren't CD quality.

[SetoTK]

That's great that they made so much. Anyone know how was the sound quality of their online album since typically a lot of music sold on online download stores aren't CD quality.

CD Quality is 128kbps

Most Music i believe is sold at 128kbps