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Radiohead's In Rainbows, more speculation on profits

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Submitted by Jim Brown on November 18, 2007 - 9:31am.

This piece in the Guardian breaks down Radiohead's possible profits from In Rainbows - an album that allowed fans to name their own price.

Some years ago, William Fisher of Stanford University published some interesting data on the cost structure of CDs. According to his figures, the retailer's slice of the CD is 38 per cent, while distributors take 8 per cent and marketing another 8 per cent.

The artist, in contrast, typically gets only 12 per cent and the music publisher 4 per cent. So the maximum Radiohead would get from a conventionally marketed CD priced at £8 is actually £1.28 - which, coincidentally, is almost exactly what Comscore thinks they got from their online experiment.

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"The atoms, as their own weight bears them down plumb through the void, at scarce determined times, in scarce determined places, from their course decline a little- call it, so to speak, mere changed trend. For were it not their wont thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one, like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void; and then collisions ne'er could be nor blows among the primal elements; and thus nature would never have created aught."

-Lucretius, Of The Nature of Things

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My name is Jim Brown and I'm a Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric at the University of Texas. I teach courses in Rhetoric, Literature, and New Media. This blog mostly focuses on my academic work, but you'll also find occasional posts about music or baseball. I also maintain two other blogs, and you can see all of my blog writings by viewing this RSS feed. I'm a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. This lets you know that I'm kind of a masochist and explains the name of my dog.

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