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I noticed after posting that you said roughly the same thing. Maybe it's just a glass half full, glass half empty. We're both acknowledging that ultimately the band is the only one who can decide what success means. For what it's worth I didn't entirely mean to suggest revenue=profit. More simply my point was that there are very clear indicators of what would be pretty universally agreed upon as success for the release, and I can't think of anything that would come close to indicating failure. When the original premise is that the "pay what you want" idea failed and that's why they haven't done it again, it feels relevant to note that was never the intention and that every indicator seems to point towards the positive. There just doesn't seem to be any evidence to support the suggestion that 'things didn't work out so well'. Things have slightly drifted since then, it seems we're all on the same page... perhaps with slightly differing accounts of how much water is in that glass.

Awesome news... except now I get to play the guessing game with how long it takes to get to the US and whether or not I got a first pressing. Curious what exactly that "order tracking" section does on the site. It doesn't lead anywhere, no one seems to be getting e-mails. If it were many years ago I'd assume it was another one of their puzzle websites.

First, I know someone else pointed this out, but the "pay what you want" experiment was always intended to be a one and done type of deal. The band made that clear very early on. It wasn't intended to be repeated so it doesn't really make sense to try and equate "success" with them trying the same thing in the future. Second that's entirely speculative and depends on your personal stance on what success means. You can't really speak for the band so you can't gauge exactly how well it worked out for them. Everything I've read from the band indicates they've been more than happy with the results and as the other link posted mentioned they were more successful digitally than they were with their previous releases combined. It sure sounds like a success to me. See that's the thing about this "debate", no one knows what the average price paid actually was because the band hasn't given any details. According to the only "data" that we do have on the release, the "average price paid" for the download was indeed $6. If you have another source for your estimations I'd be curious to read it. I think it comes down to a misunderstanding on the wording. The closest to "data" we have is an internet monitoring company named Comscore (mentioned in that first link). According to them the average price paid was $6 ($8.05 in the US). BUT, and perhaps this is where the confusion might be, the average price per download was $2.26. This is because Comscore believes 62% of users did not pay anything. So when you tally up the 38% who did pay the average price paid is $6, when you add in the people who downloaded for free the price drops to $2.26. To put it simply, if you paid nothing you aren't part of the "average price paid"... you didn't pay. http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2007/11/Radiohead-Downloads At the end of the day I see a release that garnered them more profit than their previous releases combined digitally, a physical release that totaled 1.75 million in the first year alone and a 100,000 disc box sets sold at $80. Plus, they actually got to keep ownership of their own material. If that isn't a success, I really don't know what is. That's my opinion. And that's what I think is the coolest thing about the experiment. It doesn't really matter what we think, what the label thinks or what Billboard thinks... they managed to avoid all that. In the end they remain the only ones who really know the details on it all, and fittingly for one of their first times as a band they would be able to decide what success really means for themselves.

So far Thom Yorke and Radiohead have done quite a bit of expermenting when it comes to album releases. I think all of them worked out quite well, but none of them have been repeated. Releasing a solo side project as digital and/or vinyl is one thing. Trying that for a major Radiohead release would probably cause riots. They might still release the digital files on BitTorrent but I'd wager the next Radiohead album will be on CD.

Ah! Thanks for that. I had no idea they'd sneak some new info in on there. The website has been pretty dodgy since the album released, I wouldn't have ever thought to go back there to re-read it. It's a little unclear what "This item will ship early November 2014" means. It seems you could read that two ways. Either the album is the "item" and all orders won't ship until November OR the second pressing is the "item" and it won't ship until November but the first pressing might ship earlier. It seems to me more likely that none of the orders will be shipping until November, but that's just my guess. I suppose we'll find out when the shipping confirmations start being sent out.

Source? Not that I don't believe random folks posting things on message boards (I almost always do), but the information sounds rather detailed and I'd love to read it for myself. Not me, still waiting.