The Radiohead Phenomenon

Oct 20, 2007

Since everybody’s writing about the rock band Radiohead selling its music off its website I thought I should also write something about it because basically it is about selling/promoting your content from your website.

Radiohead decided to offer its latest album for free on its website and let its fans decide what they wanted to pay for the album if they wanted to pay at all. This is an interesting development but then it is not quite that interesting; it depends on who you are. If you are a lesser-known artist will this strategy work for you? It can and it won’t, again it depends on what steps you take to promote yourself. Radiohead has an advantage; it already has a big fan base and anything they do will be covered by the media including thousands of blogs. And this really happened. As soon as the news broke out hundreds of blogs wrote about the decision and shared their comments with their respective readers. Just think how much exposure, free exposure, the rock band received. Can a lesser-known rock band perform a similar fete? It can if the artists prepare in advance.

The key here is establishing yourself and creating a fan base. This is for the rock band. But what about a normal content provider, say, for instance what if a writer wants to sell books from his or her website? Some writers like Aaron Wall are already doing it but the difference is they are not offering their books or rather ebooks for free. Can you sell your content by offering it for free? Recently the New York Times started providing its content for free because people were not ready to pay for it. So as a writer if you give people a choice of paying you or not paying you but nonetheless accessing your book, will you be able to make enough money? What if everybody downloads the book for free and nobody pays you?

Your blog can help you in this regard. With your blog you can develop your own fan following. Once you have thousands of fans I’m pretty sure that a percentage of them will surely pay you just to show their appreciation. Again in order to make them pay you you really need to offer something that is worth paying for. So before asking for a payment you will need to ask yourself, is what you’re offering unique and highly valuable?

The success of such a venture –offering content for free and leaving the choice of payment on a voluntary basis –depends on lots of targeted traffic. If you have just hundred targeted visitors per day not many are going to pay you, but if you get thousands of targeted visitors to your website or blog than some of them will definitely find your content valuable enough to pay you. What do you think about it?

Technorati Tags: radiohead, selling content, music website

One Response to “The Radiohead Phenomenon”

1. make money blogging
   November 5th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
   i never really cared for radiohead, but i think they took the right appraoch here…
   anyways anyone whos interested in making money writing articles and blogs Needafling.com is now recruiting…just hit the affiliates link
   

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