And the point is?
RADIOHEAD'S latest album, which the band allowed to download for how ever much they wanted to pay, is mostly being distributed by pirates.
Big Champagne, a Los-Angeles-based company that tracks illegal downloading on the Internet said that while 1.2 million people legitimately downloaded the album online, 500,000 picked it up from torrent sites.
Eric Garland, Big Champagne's top cork told
Forbes that in a few weeks the numbers of pirated copies will be even greater than the legitimate sales. It has him scratching his head wondering why people would bother pirating something they could get legitimately.
Garland thinks that
piracy is more habit than price. He thinks that since people do not know about Radiohead's site they will just go to their favourite Bittorrent site. You also have to register for the album which some buyers do not like.
However as far as the band is concerned, Radiohead seems to have been coins in on the plan. It has cut out record companies and keeps all the money from album sales, touring and merchandise.
It has also had more copies sold. Radiohead's previous album sold only 300,000 copies in the first week..
The INQuirer