San Francisco - Most fans of the popular rock group Radiohead chose not to pay anything when the band released its album last month in an experimental 'pay what you want' downloadable format, an internet tracking company revealed Tuesday.
Comscore Inc said that some 62 per cent of the people who downloaded In Rainbows in a four-week period last month opted not to pay the British rockers. But the remaining 38 per cent voluntarily paid an average of 6 dollars.
Among US residents, about 40 per cent who downloaded the album paid an average of 8.05 dollars.
Outside the US, the average payment of the 36 per cent of fans who opted to pay was 4.64 dollars, Comscore said.
The company collated the figures from data gathered from a few hundred people who are part of Comscore's database of 2 million computer users worldwide who give the firm permission to monitor their behaviour.
Radiohead's release of the album in a pay-what-you-want format was hailed at the time as a potentially revolutionary strategy to deal with cannibalization of music sales by freely distributed and unauthorized downloads.
Music analysts interviewed by MTV said the Comscore results represented a mixed outcome.
Though 60 per cent chose to download the album for free, they probably would never have bought it anyway, and at least Radiohead now has their email address and can market other merchandise to them, one music executive said.
On the other hand, if other groups tried similar strategies they would probably fare worse since they don't have the popularity of Radiohead and their sales campaign would also not enjoy the same novelty value.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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