Comments on: Thom Yorke will not be your server tonight

By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 21:13:04 +0000

Katie: Even someone who pays nothing has to provide a working email address, and I doubt everyone who does so is going to use a throwaway address. So at a minimum Radiohead comes out ahead of where they’d be if people picked up the album via P2P: they have at least some opportunity to do follow-up marketing. And note that providing permission for follow-up marketing is *not* optional; you can’t check out until you accept the terms of service.

As to the “conspiracy theory”, I’m not claiming that Radiohead’s doing anything nefarious. But if they truly wanted to give the album away with no strings attached then they could have just put the MP3 files on the net for unrestricted download, and then provided a separate option to allow users to pay something if they wished. (This is the real “tip jar” option, as noted by Digital Audio Insider.)

By: Katie

Katie — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 15:01:56 +0000

I really, really doubt this is the reason Radiohead is doing this. If you don’t want to give any credit card info, you don’t have to. If you just want the album, put in 0.00 and you’re done.

This isn’t some kind of massive conspiracy on Radiohead’s part to make some kind of giant marketing list.

By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:50:29 +0000

Re bad info: First, we don’t know how much bad info people will really submit. It’s possible that people interested in this offer will be less motivated to provide bogus info than one might think.

But in any case bad info is not really a problem if it can be easily detected and scrubbed. As I noted in my original post, people using throwaway email addresses will cause bounces at some point in the future and can be purged, while bogus postal addresses can be detected (at least in theory) when doing credit card processing. If you deliberately provide bogus information then you are not a good candidate for up-selling, and Radiohead would want to know that as soon as possible; bogus information can thus be viewed as a signal of prospect interest, just like the chosen price.

By: James

James — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 11:58:19 +0000

Hmmm, interesting concept that is being used more of a loss leader than anything. Funny thing is how much bad info they will get in this campaign with throwaway email addresses, disposable telephone numbers and addresses for the local landfill. Then again, like any marketing campaign, the conversion numbers are razor thin.

But, yeah, tips? No, not really.