U2 Manager Sees Radiohead In Rainbows experiment Rather a Failure

U2 manager Paul McGuiness recently gave BBC 6 Music an interview discussing about how the band intends to release its next album. When he referred to Radiohead's pay-what-you-will release over the Internet for In Rainbows in October, the manager described it as an experiment that “to some extent backfired”:

"Even though it was available on their own website for no money at all, if that was what you preferred to pay — 60 to 70 per cent of the people who downloaded the record stole it anyway even though it was available for free."

Now, of course there would be some artistic egos at stake here and that some voices in the industry are not so quick in seeing Radiohead’s approach as daring and successful but 60%-70% figure does tend to be exaggerated. According to Wired the ratio of In Rainbows website/BitTorrent downloads within the first week of release was 1.2 million/500k, which, doing a little math, means that not as much of a third of the downloaders preferred to steal the album. Even if the estimation leaves out downloads from other P2P networks, the fans that would eventually purchase the album are also not taken into consideration in the figure.

However, McGuiness’s comment is no surprise as he is well known as a conservative when it comes to the realities and demands of the new digital era having constantly demanded ISPs to take measures against illegal downloaders.