When I had heard that Radiohead was coming out with a new album called “In Rainbows” I was excited (because I’m a fan), and I was also intrigued by how they were marketing the music.  I’d head that they were giving it away for nothing… which almost made my heart stop.  Why?  Ummm… how were they going to make any money?  Isn’t that usually the major bitch of record labels when they’re selling songs for .99 cents at iTunes… too little, want people to pay more… sort of thing.  But this is crazy - FREE.  Yup, they’d lost their minds.

Now it seems that you pay what you think is a fair price for Radiohead’s music.  Over at NME it looks that it’s about £5 (or approximately $10.26 US or  $9.87 CAD) for their album.    Which to me seems cheap.  I’m not quite sure that this sort of system would hold up normally - I mean, wouldn’t we instinctively low-ball the price to get the best deal.

The interesting thing about the way Radiohead has marketed their latest album is that I’m now seeing variations of this trend on the Internet.  Today I got an email from Travis and his BumMarketingMethod.com site which I’d signed up for his newsletter.  Today I recived one where he was offering information on how to place PayPal on your site with minimal hassle.  You pick the price you’d like to pay for the info and then you get the download.   I didn’t realize that PayPal was such a pain to put on a site (apart from WordPress and it’s loop).  But some might be looking for an easier way to do it - and Travis has info that could help.  But here he’s place the payment in your hands.  You pick how much you’re wanting to pay for it.

I wonder how that will go over for him.

Another site that’s taken a bit of a twist to the “pay what you think is fair” is 1 Month.  This is the brainchild of Gary over at OSWorld, where he’s offering digital products starting at $1 and it goes up over time.  The sooner you get in to buy it - the cheaper it is.  Super marketing idea - you can sign up for announcements before the site launches at the beginning of November.   That sort of idea has me interested - and I signed up to see what’s going to be happening on the site.  Who knows what you’ll be able to find there, for a cheap (decent) price.

I’m wondering if this will become more than a trend?  Will we as marketers of digital products give this sort of payment method a try?  I’m not sure we’d make a profit, but who knows there seems to be quite a few honest people out there.  With Radioheads latest music, we all have an idea of what a CD is worth… so we’d price it out accordingly (I suppose if we’re honest).  But when it comes to digital products, how can we base a fair price since pricing varies from product to product.   Hmmmm….

With the new arrival of this sort of way to pay for products online - where we set the price - do you think it’s a viable way to sell a product?

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