November 6th, 2007
Radiohead and the search for content business models
Early results are in on Radiohead’s experiment in “name your price” music with their album In Rainbows.
These are early returns. A CD’s economic lifespan can be two years. Given the millions still being raked-in by Elvis Presley, John Lennon and George Harrison, I’d say reputation is worth a lot more than that.
Radiohead is far from the first act to try and break away from the grip of music publishing. Prince tried it. David Bowie tried it. The biggest such success among new bands was the Arctic Monkeys, who used community to gain a #1 hit, then went back to the old model.
The real problem here, I think, is that we have been relying upon artists to innovate new business models. Artists don’t want to do business models. We want to do art. Regardless of what our medium, we don’t want to work on our business, we want to work in it. We want to create.
The chief “seller” innovation in this space was Apple’s iTunes store. It’s $1/song price set a marker against which music publishers have since been forced to negotiate, even (finally) releasing their DRM grips in order to gain a foothold, and push prices higher.
As I noted before, ZDNet blogs itself is an innovator in content business models. Your traffic, your responses, and our advertising together make a living for many people, and the experiment continues.
Music has resisted advertising-assisted business models, but that’s what radio is. The ability of music publishers to shut down Internet radio set the search for such business models back several years.
But the search needs to continue. The game has not yet completely changed, but it is changing, evolving. And it will continue to evolve.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 11/07/07
