Radiohead's publisher counts three million In Rainbows sales

Jane Dyball, head of business affairs at Warner Chappell, Radiohead's publisher, gave the first official account of the In Rainbows release this morning, a year after the download went up, in a keynote at the You Are In Control conference in Reykjavik. There have been three million purchases of the album in all, counting CDs, boxes and every download, from the band's pay-what-you-want site to iTunes. Before the CD reached the shops at the end of December, the band had already made more money from In Rainbows than Hail to the Thief earned them in its whole life.

About a dozen people knew of the plan before it launched, and they ran a sweepstake on how many downloads there would be, the average price and how many boxes would sell. The winner was the band's manager, Chris Hufford of Courtyard Management.

Dyball would not give that average price. The band and their management set no end date for the offer and checked the average every day, ready to pull the download if it fell too low. It fell, as they expected, once the album spread beyond the most devoted fans, and the offer closed on 10 December. NME reports that more people took it for nothing than paid for it, and copies on BitTorrent far outnumbered downloads from the band's site, which the publisher says it had expected.

The CD has sold 1.75 million copies. It went to number one in Britain and America and is still in the top 200 in both. W.A.S.T.E., the band's mail-order shop, sold 100,000 of the £40 discbox with its second disc of extra songs. In Rainbows was also the first Radiohead album on iTunes, where it went to number one and sold 30,000 in its first American week.

Warner Chappell's UK arm licensed every digital right on the band's behalf, master recordings and image rights included, a first for the publisher. The first licence alone, for the pay-what-you-want site, brought in more than all the band's earlier digital publishing income, though that had been small, since the band kept their records off iTunes and the like. Dyball says it made a material difference⁵ to the publisher's digital revenue in Britain.

Warner Chappell calls the release a financial success but will not say whether the band would put out a record the same way again. Thom Yorke told The Hollywood Reporter in April that it was a one-off.