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Fortune Puts Radiohead's Name-Your-Price Album on List of Dumbest Ideas

by Terrence O'Brien on December 28, 2007 at 04:28 PM


Fortune magazine, like everyone else under the sun, is getting in on the year-end list making fun with The '101 Dumbest Moments in Business'.

Of interest to us is number 58. "Radiohead - Can't wait for the follow-up album, 'In Debt.'" Apparently circumventing the record labels to collect all revenues directly as a band and treating your fans as something other than just consumers is bad business. Who knew?

We wonder if Fortune is just part of the old guard, terrified to see the end of the traditional record label dominance. Lets break down the numbers for the guys at Fortune. In its first week, Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' was downloaded 1.2 million time legitimately and over 500,000 times illegally. This means that the number of legitimate copies of the album far out-strips pirated copies, something no other popular album seems to be able to accomplish anymore. According ComScore's questionable reports only 38 percent of those who downloaded 'In Rainbows' actually paid for it, and those people only paid an average of $6 a pop. So that means 456,000 people (making it one of the fastest-selling albums of the year, by the way) paid a little shy of $3 million directly to the band, as opposed to almost $7 million to a record label who would have funneled much less than $3 million to the band.

This entry on their list makes sure Fortune will be on our list of 'out of touch companies, publications, and people who will desperately cling to relevance in the coming years.'

From Fortune

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Tags: business, digital media, DigitalMedia, download, fortune, music, radiohead, top lists, TopLists

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