October 10, 2007

Radiohead, Freakonomics and free music

Radiohead grabbed headlines last week by announcing that fans will be allowed to name their own price when downloading the band’s new album, In / Rainbows. The band is currently taking pre-orders via their official website, which saw an 11-fold increase in UK Internet traffic last week to become the most visited website in our Music – Bands and Artists category. Radiohead are one of the few current UK bands to make it really big across the Atlantic, and this was illustrated by the fact that their site also jumped 260 places to become the seventh most visited band website in the US last week. Back in the UK, they even managed to outperform the Spice Girls, who saw a jump in traffic to their official site after they announced some additional reunion tour dates.

So why give away your album for free? It’s certainly a model that’s becoming fashionable in the music industry. Indie band The Charlatans also announced last week that they would give away their new single for free, while Prince has just finished a hugely successful sell out run of gigs at the 02 Arena that was promoted by giving away his new album with the Daily Mail. Using the music as a trailer for concerts is probably the most talked about approach, and the Radiohead example bears this out: the number one website visited after their homepage last week was a ticketing site.

However, for Radiohead there may have been a number of other possible motivations: their political stance; the fact that, after 15 years of success, they probably don’t need the money; or maybe even an interesting experiment in Freakanomics. One assumption is that people are now so used to downloading music for free from file sharing sites that bands may as well just give it away. I decided to test this theory by comparing visitors to Radiohead’s site with those to Blubster, currently the most popular file sharing site for music in the UK. The chart below illustrates the representation of a number of Experian MOSAIC lifestyle groups amongst visitors to both the Radiohead and the Blubster site.

The first thing to point out is that there are 6 MOSAIC groups that I haven’t included in the graph because their representation across both websites was broadly similar. These 6 were mostly middle income groups, but, as the graph shows, the real differences lie within the higher and low income groups. Lower income groups such as 'Municipal Dependency' are over-indexed on Blubster but under-indexed on the Radiohead site; and vice versa in the case of higher-income groups such as Urban Intelligence.

This data says a few things: Blubster’s users are more likely to come from lower income groups, while Radiohead fans are more likely to come from higher income groups. This is not particularly surprising – Radiohead are, after all, considered to be the typical ‘middle class student band’ – but the data also shows that the assumption "people would just download it anyway, no one buys music anymore" is not necessarily true in the case of Radiohead fans. It’ll be really interesting to see how much people do pay for the album – let’s hope that Radiohead are Freakonomics fans, and decide to release the data!

Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
Posted to Demographics | Mosaic lifestyle | Music | Shopping and Classifieds

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Posted by: Paul at October 11, 2007 02:13 PM

Posted by: Robin Goad at October 12, 2007 12:39 PM

Posted by: Robin Goad at May 13, 2008 07:43 AM

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