Radiohead release In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-want download

Radiohead released In Rainbows, their seventh album, on 10 October as a download from their own website, ten days after announcing it, with each buyer naming the price. The band will not say how many people have ordered it or what they paid.

Pre-order customers' activation codes led straight to a zip file of ten 160kbps MP3s, with no copy protection, no artwork and no lyrics. Buyers complained on the band's site and on fan forums that the bitrate should have been stated before they chose a price. The album is not on iTunes, whose files run at 128kbps. Jonny Greenwood says the band only wanted to do a bit better than that. It's never going to be CD quality, because that's what CD does.¹

The £40 discbox ships in December, and an ordinary CD is planned for early 2008, once a record deal is done. Stanley Donwood spent about ten months on the artwork, making etchings by dropping photographic prints into acid baths. To those who say the box costs too much, he points out that £40 is about the price of a Premier League match.

Those who had pre-ordered mostly got their files without trouble, but radiohead.com buckled on the day under the people trying to buy. Thom Yorke posted a note on the site called “Hard Hats On”, saying it was a relief to have the record out after a mad couple of weeks.

NME's online radio station played the album whole at 11am, an hour before Xfm did the same. Last.fm says more than 12,500 of its users played it on the first day, and “15 Step” alone over 22,000 times.

“Nude” goes back a decade, to its first live performance in Tokyo on 23 January 1998, and was once called “Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)”. Yorke and Jonny first played “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” at the Royal Festival Hall in London in March 2005, and most of the others came in on the 2006 tour.

Meryl Blackburn of the Official Charts Company says the band's site is not a chart-registered retailer, so In Rainbows will miss Sunday's top 40. Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief all went to number one in Britain; for now the run stops at three.

Unofficial reports gathered by Billboard put the typical payment at about £5. NME's readers, asked a week before release, gave the same figure, with answers from nothing to £10. The nothing came from Rafael Castillo in Venezuela, where exchange controls stopped him paying the eight dollars he meant to; he says he feels bad. Chris Hufford, one of the band's two managers, says some people are paying who do not even like Radiohead, because they like the idea. We're prepared to take a risk and we might come out looking very foolish⁸, says Bryce Edge, the other. But we believe if your music is great, then people will pay for it.⁸

In Rainbows: tracklist