Radiohead are rich!

Still. Or, again. Also, maybe?

According to Gigwise, a source "close to the band" says they have sold 1.2 million copies of their digital label-free pay-whatever-you-want release "In Rainbows" in its first week (well, three days, really, but including preorders), beating out their previous album by a factor of four, as well as crushing Bruce Springsteen's new release this week. That's even more than Kanye sold! Although, to be fair, not more than Kanye PLUS 50 Cent, since I doubt Bruce was really eating into Radiohead's sales all that much this week.

But, a) it could be totally not true, and b) who knows how much people paid? If it's one pence a download, that's only £12k. Of course most people paid more than that -- I paid 5 pounds, which (plus the credit card processing fee) converted to $11.11 on my statement, which I thought was awfully nifty.

So we will all wait and watch our rebel bands (NIN is also label-free (see 10/8 comment), and promises to do fun stuff soon, though really, does Trent do anything fun?) and see what will happen. A lot of people who complain about music theft seems to be missing a major thing here -- the market pays what the market wants. If you're turning hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens into intellectual property master thieves, you are charging too much. People would rather buy than steal, but they don't want to be robbed. (Ooh, wasn't that pithy!)

It's the end of the world, right Andrew Keen? Stupid git.