So much for Anarchy

According to Yahoo Music news that great purveyor of fascinating truth and certainty, 60% of Radiohead fans paid bugger all to download their latest album ‘In Rainbows’
The idea of letting fans pay for a product or in a more general sense letting a customer pay what they think the product is worth is not new to me, in Greece at the end of the evening we would pay the barman for his time and what we had drunk, we paid him what we thought we owed him and there were two beneficial outcomes to this.
The first was that we ended up paying a lot less than we would have done drink for drink and the second was that the barman sold a hell of a lot more alcohol than he would have if he’d charged drink for drink and so was more than fairly recompensed for his work, plus he seemed to having a bloody good time with the rest of us.
Asides from this was the less tanglible effect that instead of having a customer, businessman relationship we had a much more informal person and person relationship, it was simple we all wanted beer right on into the night, Nikos wanted to make a living out of it we knew that we both had a mutual interest so it was in our interests to pay him fairly and his interests to not start getting all profit driven and extracting every last penny he could from us.
This really all comes down to the iterated prisoners dilemma as does a lot of human interaction and I think that Radiohead fans have just screwed up their chances of having their favourite band repeat this experiment.
It is exactly the same idea as the bar, Radiohead do music, their fans enjoy it, rather than set a price on their album the band have allowed the fans to pay them a fair price for their time and effort.
Ideally fans would end up paying less than the retail price but still a good amount and Radiohead make money, maintain a happy fanbase who saved some pennies and possibly even widen their fanbase, its the old economic principle of lower unit prices=more sales.
Unfortunately people have simply abused this and paid insulting amounts if they have paid at all, according to internet research group Comscore only 4% of the 1.2 million people thought to have downloaded the album, paid more than £6.
What these fans have done though is go for immediate benefit at the cost of future benefit, had this worked out Radiohead might even start doing pay as you see fit gigs, merchandise and future albums but if they want to be able to produce any more music they are going have to go back to putting a set price on their products.
It’s a sad case of abusing trust and it really disappoints me to think that people can have so little respect for the labour of another.