Today Radiohead announced the stats behind the pay-what-you-wish release of last year’s hit ‘In Rainbows.’ This gives us an insight into whether the idea is worth it for bands and whether it made them a tonne of cash basically.

Radiohead's weird album cover...

Luckily for the band, they made one hell of a lot of moolah. In fact, it generated more money from the downloads than their last album ‘Hail To The Thief’ made in 2003. This was before the physical release and ‘In Rainbows’ boxsets arrived – suffice to say, they are very rich men now.

According to the NME and Music Ally articles, Jane Dyball, the head of business affairs at Warner Chappell, who were the company behind this ‘experiment’ has said that most fans chose to pay nothing for the album, but refused to reveal the actual average download price paid by Radiohead fans. Dyball also revealed that Radiohead management and Warner Chapell were monitoring the daily average download price across the three-month period, and were prepared to suspend all downloads if the price dipped below a certain level.

After the physical release, the album reached Number 1 in both the US and UK charts, selling over 1.75 million copies to date. They’ve also reached nearly 17 million streams on last.fm. Radiohead management have refused to reveal whether the band’s next release will follow a similar route or not.

Brilliant stuff really for what was essentially an experiement. Finally, a fresh take on buying music came to the fore – something that interested those who would usually download from BitTorrent or Limewire as well as the hardcore Radiohead fans that would never take their music for free. I’ll admit that I don’t actually own the album as I am not a Radiohead fan at all and the website never seemed to work when I put £0.00 in as my price. Ho hum…

Thoughts? Leave me a comment!

[EDIT: The Economist published the average prices last year. Thanks oldnil for commenting]