MattCreamer.com

This is huge news if you care at all about how traditional media companies and marketing approaches are adapting to a digital world. Radiohead, an enormously popular British band that’s long been able to balance both critical acclaim and underground cred with mass appeal, announced last night that customers will be able to set their own price for its soon-to-be-released record from the band’s website.

Since the band fulfilled its obligations to EMI and seemed to be dilly-dallying without a major label, I’d been hoping Radiohead would try something like this. As the Wall Street Journal (firewall) notes, it’s unclear whether there’s any major label involvement at all, but, at least initially, the only place to get the record will be the website. Any number of smaller acts are marketing and distributing through homemade sites, MySpace, YouTube and other social media outlets, but, to my knowledge, no such disruption to the traditional means of distribution has been attempted on such a scale. This is more than just a digital distribution thing. This is Radiohead–who doesn’t make its songs available on iTunes. dividing control of how it’s album will be bought by two parties: itself and its fans. This is a flip of the bird to the record labels, who perhaps along with the film studios are the most clueless of the Big, Old Media, as they watch their business models being pulled out from underneath. And it’s a back of the hand to the likes of Apple and Starbucks, who like to position themselves as industry saviors with their distribution offerings.

If this model works, it’ll be easy to envision acts with established audience’s like Radiohead’s following suit. My hunch is that this will be good for everyone except, of course, for the middlemen at the record labels. Plus, it could vindicate the paid-model when it comes to music. A lot of smart people believe the Apple standard of 99 cents per track is too expensive and the release of “in Rainbows” will test whether consumers, who don’t seem to be experience large amounts of guilt from pirating music, will be more interested in ponying up if they can name their price.

Lastly, this could go down bid to save the album, a concept that’s been under fire since the rise of digital downloading. One of the reasons Radiohead has resisted Apple is that it wants people to buy the entire album rather than download individual songs. This is definitely an arrogant position, but if there’s one band that can make a claim to it on aesthetic grounds, it’s Radiohead. The band’s discography is dominated by records whose sums are bigger than the individual parts. Problem is, a lot music consumers don’t care about that and, rightfully, don’t want to pay 13 bucks when they’ll only listen to two songs. But Radiohead’s position becomes more justifiable when there’s a more level playing field, one that allows that casual fan to pay just two dollars for those 13 songs.