Name Your Price
It was four years ago that Radiohead did what most people brushed aside as “just a publicity stunt”, when they called upon fans and music lovers alike to just name their price for their seventh studio album, In Rainbows.
A bold move – but one that did far more for them than any multimillion pound advertising campaign. We would never expect to see a Radiohead tour to be sponsored by Pepsi, or for that matter for them to be filling out the O2, so was this master-stroke or just a massive band having a massive laugh?
Within hours of this radical new payment model being announced, the Intenet was awash with conversations about this crazy, new fangled idea; that giving the consumer the power to pay what they wanted would never work and that it was just a way of getting coloumn inches for free.
Well they were half-right, it did get people talking, it was one of the most redefining moments of the last decade for the music industry. In a world where consumers want things yesterday, this was ultimately giving the fan exactly what they wanted. The world is getting more inpatient with what it feels it needs and someone realised it. But what may seem on the face of things as a lovely gesture, was also viral marketing at its most shrewdest.
We will probably not see a major artist ‘do a Radiohead’ for quite a long time, not because artists can’t afford to, they often make more money from the tours and merchandise than from album sales; it’s just that in a world where celebrity endorsements and advertising has reached almost epidemic proportions, doing something different is more often the best way of getting noticed.
