'In Rainbows' Goes Head To Head With P2Ps

At Ease reports: *Despite the fact that the new Radiohead album ‘In Rainbows’ was practically free for those who wouldn’t want to pay for it, the 10 new tracks were still downloaded illegally on peer-to-peer networks. According to reports from Forbes and ARS, once the album became available at inrainbows.com, it spilled immediately onto P2P networks, primarily BitTorrent. Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, a Los-Angeles-based company that tracks illegal downloading on the Internet, said the album was grabbed by BitTorrent users roughly 240,000 times in the first day of release and has tailed off since in “a perfect half-life curve.” Over the following days, the file was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day—adding up to more than 500,000 total illegal downloads.

That’s less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported earlier. But Eric Garland, Big Champagne’s chief executive, says illegal file-sharing is likely to overtake legal downloads in the coming weeks, given that many of those 1.2 million legitimate sales were pre-orders taken during the 10 days between when the band announced the album and its actual release last Thursday.With popular album releases, illegal download volumes normally outstrip sales, says Garland. But more surprising is that fans chose to steal music they could legally download for any price they choose. The fact that the band let users set a price for the music also encourages the perception that the price of music should be up to the buyer. If both BitTorrent and Radiohead offer the album for the same price, fans might see little difference between the two sources. In fact, Radiohead’s move might even make BitTorrent look increasingly legitimate as a forum for picking up new music. Thus, assessing this as a “piracy versus free” issue isn’t exactly right; once some users got the message that it was “free,” it didn’t matter where they got the album. Garland argues that this kind of digital theft is more a matter of habit than of economics. “People don’t know Radiohead’s site. They do know their favorite BitTorrent site and they use it every day,” he says. “It’s quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version.”

But for Doug Lichtman, an intellectual property professor at the UCLA School of Law, the volume of piracy following In Rainbows‘ release erodes the success of Radiohead’s innovation. “If the community rejects even forward-thinking experiments like this one, real harm is done to the next generation of experimentation and change,” he says. Lichtman speculates that users may have interpreted Radiohead’s offer as a giveaway and so felt more comfortable downloading the album from other free sources. Fans may also have been turned off by the band’s requirement that users register by providing their name and e-mail and postal addresses. The ultimate lesson may simply be that it’s hard to compete with free, Lichtman says. “Registration is a small barrier,” he says. “Sadly, even that little bit of cost might be too much.”*

MP3: Radiohead - Stupid Car (alternate link)