The Decision Strategist

By now you must have seen the news discussing Radiohead’s new album and their decision to shun record companies and release their record by themselves. In fact, they’ve decided to release it online and let people decide how much money to give them. Here’s the link.

Trent Reznor’s doing the same thing.

And then there’s things like Songslide, which lets bands add their music and users pay whatever price they like.

It’s more evidence of changes in the music industry and the failing tactics of the RIAA.

But what I find really interesting are the ways in which bands releasing their music for free are making use of referencing and priming to encourage people to spend money. Radiohead puts an empty price box in which you can put how many GBP’s you want to pay for the album and very little else. Not a lot of an attempt to make people pay more, but other artists do things differently.

There is one artist’s website I’ve seen that lets you pay a price you choose, but explicitly puts the ‘average’ price as one of your options, and tells you what that average is. It’s a great idea for two reasons.

First, having the average that people have given changes the reference point from $0 to a much higher value (I think it was usually around $10). Whatever you were considering paying gets referenced to this average, with the accompanying feelings of guilt (or getting a good deal) when you pay less and the possible pride in paying more. I could see the average backfiring by causing people who would pay more to just opt for the average, but my suspicion is that people not paying much of anything is more of a problem.

Second, it explicitly engages moral self judgment. If you pay significantly less than average, you are more likely to feel cheap or selfish. This self-watching, like pictures of watching eyes, has real effects on peoples behavior.

There isn’t any data on how much people pay for albums in this kind of setting yet, but it’d be very interesting to look at differences in payment based on how the interface for downloading is set up.

I’ve been trying to remember which artist does this, so if any of you know please tell me.

-zot

ps - I really like In Rainbows so far.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Decision Making, Economics, Ideas.