On the Radiohead and the Booker Prize

There's a bit more information now - of varying quality - on Radiohead's experiment in letting people set their own price for the group's new album. That's important for writers to follow, because many of us will have to find ways of making our own markets and success independent of publishers who keep ratcheting down payments to authors while they still try to get how to make money on the Internet.

According to a Forbes article, many people are still pirating the new Radiohead album, even though they could go to the site and get a legitimate copy for free if they wanted to:

On the first day that Radiohead's latest became available, around 240,000 users downloaded the album from copyright-infringing peer-to-peer BitTorrent sources, according to Big Champagne, a Los-Angeles-based company that tracks illegal downloading on the Internet. Over the following days, the file was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day—adding up to more than 500,000 total illegal downloads.

That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com. But Eric Garland, Big Champagne's chief executive, says illegal file-sharing is likely to overtake legal downloads in the coming weeks, given that many of those 1.2 million legitimate sales were pre-orders taken during the 10 days between when the band announced the album and its actual release last Thursday.

Garland suggests that the real culprit is habit - they go to their favorite BitTorrent sites and download in the way they're used to doing.

However, even with lots of pirating, consider the economics. According to a London Times article (and we'll get to the main part of the article in a minute), an Internet survey of about 3,000 people who bought the Radiohead album suggested that most paid an average of £4. Although this won't be particularly accurate, it's the best numbers possible: a rough total of £4.8 million on the album, all going to the band. Given the economics of regular record deals and distribution, I think they made a whole lot more this way. The real test will be whether they do the same on their next album.

But what does this have to do with the Man Booker Prize? Because it plans to make the novels on its short list available for free online:

The downloads will not impact on sales, it is thought. If readers like a novel tasted on the Internet, they may just be inspired to buy the actual book.

Journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow has said for a while, now, that making his books available for free online has increase his actual sales. As I said, this is something that every writer will have to face. Will it be the necessary free part of freelance?