Pricing, Post Modern
October 4th, 2010
If you’ve been even passively following the media over the past few years you know that the music industry has a problem. A very serious problem at that, pricing; what do you charge people for something they can just as easily get for free. Any economist will tell you that any rational person will download music for free, it costs too much money to not. So the problem is transformed from what do you charge them, to how? Justification? Pleas that piracy is destroying the industry the consumers so love and that they are thereby hurting the musicians they love when they download illegally. Business world pay attention, this is how you pricing in the music industry of tomorrow is going to work. Members of the UK alternate rock group Radiohead decided for their 7th release, In Rainbows, that the band would sell it independently online. The band decided that the consumer would decide what they would pay for the album, you could say pay $15 on your credit card or simply type in free and download it. In Rainbows outsold Hail to the Thief, the band’s previous album with Parlophone Records.