OK Download

Mark Mulligan | October 10, 2007, 07:52 AM

OK so I thought I’d take Radiohead up on their offer of paying whatever I liked for their new album. I decided to try to pay a pittance for the sake of research, which goes against my natural instincts but these guys have done well out of me over the years, from seeing them play pre-record deal on the Uni campus circuit, through watching them play at ULU the week Creep hit the charts (for the first time) and having bought most albums since. Mind you a couple of the later ones left me with the distinct sensation I’d been robbed…..Anyway, if I like it I’ll probably go buy another copy for a more respectable amount.

But I digress.

• So, not surprisingly the website appears to be struggling under the strain of demand. It took me three attempts to get on the site.• Once there the pages were painfully slow but I eventually got the download page….
• …which hadn’t been updated and still told me that the download was available for pre order only until 10th October.
• When I finally managed to add the download to the basket (which took 2 attempts) only to find the basket page would not display. This happened three times.
• I finally arrived at the payment page, tried to pay 10 pence and mysteriously got a ‘page cannot be displayed’ message. Back to square one.
• A few more rounds of the above finally got me to check out where indeed I was able to pay 10 pence with just a 45 pence admin charge.

All in all the purchase process alone took me just under 20 minutes…which I guess whittles out the non-core fans…which of course would be no bad thing just in case they should happen to sign that deal with EMI in time for the Christmas rush. What? Could this really be part of a clever marketing ploy to drive good old fashioned CD sales?! Just call me a die hard cynic.

EDIT - 55 pence works out at 5.5 pence a song...a little bit different from the RIAA's $150,000 valuation