Who’s The Idiot?

Smith told MusicRadar.com he thought Radiohead’s strategy for selling their last album, In Rainbows, needed some further thought.

“The Radiohead experiment of paying what you want – I disagreed violently with that.”

Really Robert? Violently, huh? How so?

“The idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan. You can’t allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don’t consider what you do to have any value at all and that’s nonsense.”

Wow. So you’re telling me that for the past 25 years, the reason I’ve been paying $19.99 retail for CDs by The Cure is because that’s how much you think your music is worth? And I thought it was your record label gouging the public for a piece of plastic that cost between 75 cents and a dollar to manufacture. (Yeah, yeah – there are other costs to take into account, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

“If I put a value on my music and no one’s prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan, it can’t work.”

Uh huh. “It can’t work.” You know, I think you’re on to something there. Except for the niggling little fact that it did.

Even though Radiohead allowed “other people to put a price” on its music, the album still went to No. 1 in the States and the UK when it was finally released physically. Months after it was available for nothing (or next to nothing) digitally.

In fact, Rainbows became the band’s highest charting album in the U.S. since 2000’s Kid A. That sounds like a successful strategy to me.

And let’s not forget Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I – IV, which, in addition to being offered for free, was available as a $300 ultra-deluxe version and sold 2,500 copies in three days, grossing $750,000 in the process. Not bad for an “idiot plan.”

Could Smith’s outburst just be a case of sour grapes? Maybe. After all, The Cure’s latest, 4:13 Dream, stalled at No. 16 in the States and fared even worse at home in the U.K., only managing to climb to No. 33.