A couple of years ago at a film panel discussion I had to smile at the irony of a $600/hour entertainment attorney solemnly intoning to an audience questioner that his indie-film revenue issues would be solved if he embraced “the Radiohead model.” That is, if the filmmaker decided, like the English superstar band did with their album In Rainbows, to allow fans to pay what they want, even if that was only a penny. But that was back when free was the thing. Indeed, while others had previously experimented with such pricing models, that Radiohead did so with one of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2011It’s Independent Film Week and the IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Conference, so I thought I’d bring up Radiohead before some panelist does. A couple of years ago I remember sitting at a panel (not at the IFP, actually) at which a young filmmaker was asking how to jumpstart his own business model. A guy onstage in a suit who probably billed at $600 an hour looked at him and said, “The answer is Radiohead,” referring to the band’s strategy of releasing their In Rainbows digitally over the internet for whatever price fans were willing to pay. (The band subsequently released a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 19, 2010