I paid £5 for the album, being the honest person I am. I have to say I don't really like the album, its not grown on me much and I don't think its worth a fiver. However as a huge fan of radiohead I will, no doubt, buy the next album anyway!

Paris - cause she's a fan of many musicians (in hotel rooms).

Something which every article mentioning the NIN Ghosts release seems to forget is that the entire album was released under a creative commons license, such that there is no legal or moral stigma attached to passing it on (in whatever format, lossless or otherwise.) That goes much further than Radiohead's little experiment, and doesn't seem to have hurt Mr Reznor's sales...

Right from the start (and I've said as much here on a couple of occassions) I wasn't capable of deciding how much the album was worth before I downloaded a copy, so I (naturally) put £0.00 as my download price.

Had I really enjoyed it, I would then have gone back and paid a fiver, which would have come out as £2.50 on average over my two "purchases". Actually, given the number of times my download crashed, it could have been more like £1.22, or even £1 on average.

However, I didn't like it enough to justify paying for a low bitrate MP3 and I am now thinking of buying the CD.

The figures are totally useless, because we have precious little valid data to compare them against.

I paid 10 quid for the download, whose quality was appalling, but paid nothing for the FLAC version of the proper release. Does that make me a freetard or not?

Had radiohead only done a CD version, I doubt I would have bought it - let alone listened to it. Last time I bought a NEW cd was many years ago. (2nd hand ones often)

After hearing Rainbows - I'm off to watch them play a gig in Glasgow later this year (with a few m8s) So the money they are getting out of me , shouldn't be confined to the download price.

Tux , cause Im glad the download wasn't windows or apple DRM.

Despite being a huge Radiohead fan, I feel totally ripped off by them. I was impressed with their "ditch the record label, embrace digital distribution" stance when the album was first announced. I went to the site and paid full album price, happy that the money would be going directly to the band, instead of lining the pockets of some worthless music biz exec.

When the download finally finished, I was left with a bunch of crap quality MP3s and no artwork. (I don't even like the album much, but that's irrelevant). As if that wasn't bad enough, Thom subsequently appeared to be saying that everyone with any sense would be buying the CD release anyway. I don't want a worthless piece of plastic taking up space on my shelf, when all of my music listening happens through the PC that's connected to the stereo in my lounge.

I've always had a lot of respect for the Radiohead guys, both as people and as musicians. The former has pretty much evaporated now, and I'm sad to say the latter is on the way out too.

never mind free downloads, when will they stop selling physical CD's in these horrible cardboard foldy cases. Is it too much to ask for my album in a jewel case???? IS IT?

Robin above says; "the average price that people chose to pay for the album was £1.10 or so. After the record company profits^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdistribution costs are removed from tradition sales, they receive about a quid.

So 'giving something away' earns 10% more profit for the artist than selling it."

This is the kind of laughable logic that The Registrar is attacking. Selling it for £1.10 does not mean £1.10 profit and removing a record company from the equation doesn't magically remove production costs. Once we subtract all them, and subtract personal expenses, you can be sure the bottom line profit enjoyed by the artist is less that £1.

so not 'web only' means dissing freetards.. I think Mr Haines needs to go back to reading class... Saying people still want the physical obect for the shelf is in no way 'dissing freetards' read it again 'will not repeat web ONLY'

Hats off to Reznor and the NIN boys. I paid $5 for Ghosts in FLAC format, and regardless of the creative commons licesnse, this model works. I would have paid £5 but then I am not going to know a new double album for £3.22 (according to PayPal) in my lifetime so I shant grumble...

It is the perfect solution to cutting out the middleman. If I loved the album, I might get the CD, but even then there's a nice PDF of the artwork in the download and pretty much everything I want.

This is the only way to go. It respects the people who buy the music, and doesn't treat them like idiots by giving a good quality product. iTunes et al don't delivery this. Maybe if you 79p gave you a lossless file things would be different, but still not value for money.

Perhaps it's interesting to note that this "honesty experiment" was preceeded by author Stephen King for a web book called "The Plant" in 2000. He released six or seven chapters as downloads & then got fed up with people who didn't pay for it. Since then he's only released his books as printed versions. Probably wise.

I hadn't bought any of their stuff since 'OK Computer', but when I read good reviews of 'In Rainbows' I decided to buy it on CD. I ended up liking it so much that I decided to get the 180g vinyl version as well, which actually sounds a lot better.

I think it's great that we can get such a wide spectrum of price, quality, convenience and sense of ownership for an album these days, and Radiohead have pushed this even further than normal with their deluxe edition versus their honesty box download. It's true that it's unlikely to ever work again as a marketing exercise in quite the same way, but it's a great way of making the music available to more people of different interest levels in the format they want.

I just hope it continues to be viable to produce these heavy vinyl LP releases for those who want them, because they really are amazing.

"This is the kind of laughable logic that The Registrar is attacking. Selling it for £1.10 does not mean £1.10 profit and removing a record company from the equation doesn't magically remove production costs. Once we subtract all them, and subtract personal expenses, you can be sure the bottom line profit enjoyed by the artist is less that £1"

IIRC, from what I've read production costs are generally effectively paid for from the artist's royalties anyway. (Specifically, they're paid from the advance, and the artist's royalties initially go to repaying the advance. I think songwriting-related royalties don't, though.) Record companies work in interesting ways, and record contracts are worth less than they appear to be.

Sorry, that argument doesn't hold water. Check out the Baen Free Library at Baen Books. Read some of the things that Eric Flint (successful sci-fi author for those that don't know & the guy in charge of the library) has written there regarding this very topic. In one of the posts, Mr. Flint wrote that Mercedes Lackey saw her royalties substantially increase on books that had been published several years before by a previous publishing firm shortly AFTER adding a recent release, DRM-free book to the Free Library. As I recall, prior to adding the book to the library, royalties for both books discussed were either in a decline or had not changed in a while. These changes in royalties occured within a couple of months of adding the book to the library. BTW, it is not unusual for the Baen authors to post "snippets," sometimes totaling the first 1/3 of an unfinished book to Baen's Bar. Some of the fans love them, some hate them (I hate them - I get to read part of a great story and then I have to wait several months for the book to be released...or I have to buy the advanced reader copy...). Quite frankly, I have purchased books from a lot of authors I wouldn't have because of the books given away for FREE.