Study counts 2.3 million torrent downloads of Radiohead's In Rainbows

In Rainbows was downloaded about 2.3 million times from torrent sites between 10 October and 3 November last year, while Radiohead's own site was offering it for whatever people chose to pay, nothing included. The estimate is by Will Page and Eric Garland. Page is the chief economist at the MCPS-PRS Alliance, the British collecting society for songwriters and publishers, and Garland's company, Big Champagne, tracks file-sharing networks. Their paper, “In Rainbows, on Torrents”, is the tenth in the Alliance's Economic Insight series, dated 29 July.

Both routes cost nothing, and millions still went to torrent sites such as the Pirate Bay rather than radiohead.com. Page and Garland put much of it down to habit, as Garland already did last October when he counted more than half a million shared copies a week after the download opened. People who get their music from torrent sites went where they always go, and the band's site, which struggled in its first days, may have sent some of them there too. The authors liken the big torrent sites to a familiar local pub, popular for its reputation, location, value and ease of use, and write that a large part of that comfort is the ability to stay anonymous¹. Even a free download from Radiohead's site meant handing over an email address and other contact details, and for a file-sharer that was a cost.

On the first day, 10 October, almost 400,000 copies went by torrent. The best week the study finds for Panic at the Disco's Pretty. Odd. was almost 158,000, and for Gnarls Barkley's The Odd Couple 128,000. By November the album was down to around 15,000 torrent downloads a day.

Page and Garland reckon the torrent total is far above anything outsiders have estimated for the band's site, and Radiohead have never published a count. Nine Inch Nails, who also gave an album away, drew more downloads from their site than from torrents, and In Rainbows still went to number one in Britain and America once it reached the shops. Thom Yorke said in April that the pay-what-you-want download was a one-off. The authors admit their figures raise more questions than they settle. There are too many unknowns, too many variables and - given it's a black market - an understandable lack of evidence to even generalize towards an answer¹.