See Radiohead. They offered their online album for and only asked for payment - you didn't have to if you didn't want to.

Average price paid? $5, IIRC. For something people could get for free.

Average price paid dilutes the statistic by dividing it by the statistically meaningless number of people who download music directly from the site. If only one person downloaded the song from the site, donated $5, and then posted it to an anonymous file-sharing service from which twenty million other people downloaded it (for fear of the gathering of statistics like these), then you would get exactly the same $5 per person.

The bottom line is the gross profits made, which actually amounted to $6-$10 million, which was truly impressive for a digital distribution, but not even within three orders of magnitude of an average albumn run by the music industry. Still, no music industry overheads means the members of the band get to keep more of that money.

"Meanwhile, Forbes and BigChampagne revealed that on the first day the album was available, 240K people downloaded it for free over BitTorrent, and that over the following days an average of 100K people per day did the same, for a total of over 500K BitTorrent downloads over the initial week of its release. It appears that even though the album was available for free on InRainbows.com, plenty of people preferred to use BitTorrent rather than Radiohead's site, which required an email registration (although some of those BitTorrent downloads may have been the result of slowdowns on the ordering site)."

- Wired

Not all that meaningless if you can account, to some measure, for the variables.

Now, statistically, all that does is increase the amount paid per purchaser at their site. As for the total average, including the figures you stated, that'd drop the payment from ~$5-8 down to $2.80 - $3.40.

However, the point of what I was making wasn't the actual price paid - it's that people value the music and are willing to pay for it even when they can get it free. Just not $15 on average (which is what many music stores charge) or even the $9-10 that CrapMart is charging (last I heard, don't shop there).

I think that if more artists followed this model, the economics and face of music would change a bit. And hell, getting rid of the corporate music industry can't be a bad thing, now can it?

Of course it would change... if you could get more artists to do it. Just like you could make your own plastic explosives if you could get more atmospheric nitrogen to spontaneously combine with water to make ammonia and oxygen. Unfortunately, just as that chemical process runs contrary to the laws of thermodynamics, and thus requires significant energy input and entropy control to do on any scale large enough to even start making plastic explosives from, the whole "artists should be willing to sacrifice $10 million in net profits (say, 1% of the gross of $1 billion, which today would be considered a failed albumn run) for $6 million in gross profits (that's still getting split up with equipment expenses, and you have to do all the paperwork yourself or see even more of it disappear), artists are naturally more attracted to the "more money and less effort" option.

Not to say there are humans that don't run contrary to nature, just like maybe one in every several sextillion molecules of nitrogen and water actually do spontaneously recombine to make ammonia and oxygen. It's just that beyond three decimal points, nobody gives a damn.

I *really* need to start proofreading these comments before posting. My mom (who was an English teacher) would break down if she ever saw those sentences.

However, that's just for the "star" artists - not the run of the mill types that aren't on labels or are on indie labels. I'm not asking the artists to sacrifice any monies at all - I'm just saying that leveraging the existing tech to distribute a product and cut out a middleman that's adding no value to the consumer. What Radiohead did was a proof of concept thing more than anything. It can be done - and done profitably. Studio time is a very minor component of the overall cost of an album. The equipment costs and required bandwidth could be a couple of points of the expense, but even then, the profit margin and total dollars are very nice - and this is just for the first week.

But, to be honest, there's a lot of profit to be made past 3 decimal points. My industry looks to the 4th decimal as part of our pricing strategies on a very regular basis - as do all large corporations. It just means that you have to have a large enough sample set for it to matter.