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Radiohead fans preferred to download 'illegal' versions of 'In Rainbows'

More people got the album from P2P sites official site?

August 1, 2008 | 9 Comments
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A study has claimed that more people downloaded Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' album from illegal peer-to-peer websites than the band's own site, despite it being offered there for free.

A research paper from P2P monitor Big Champagne and the UK’s MCPS-PRS royalty collector said that 2.3 million people chose to download the album from sites such as BitTorrent rather than Inrainbows.com.

The report called the number "staggering", saying that it: "far exceeds what outsiders have reported as the estimated download total from the band's official website, regardless of whether those downloaders paid or not."

Radiohead have so far refused to disclose either how much money they made from Inrainbows.com, or how many people downloaded the album from the site in total.

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Comments (9)

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Apron Strings

Aug 4, 2008

Does it mention whether that was before or after the download on the site was stopped to make way for the CD version?

time_for_something_biblical

Aug 4, 2008

I paid Â£5 for the album, which is pretty average I guess, I also downloaded the album, using P2P, due to the album I downloaded legit & paid money for wouldn't sync onto my mp3 or play on Windows Media Player or Winamp. More people might of experienced difficulties like that, so decided to download using P2P, so they could actually listen to it!

trowel

Aug 4, 2008

There are morons who will download anything, just because it's there. They won't have listened to it.

Gajarga

Aug 4, 2008

I tried to download the album from the official site when it was released, but it was under such load that the download kept timing out. After several unsuccessful attempts over a day or so, I went the P2P route and was able to get the album in just a few minutes.If the official site had had enough capacity to handle all the requests, I think you would have seen the number of P2P downloads substantially decreased.

gd1984

Aug 4, 2008

probably because radiohead's free one was 160kbs, and was only available for a certain amount of time, compared with non-official methods of getting it, which were available longer, and also at higher quality not log after the free offer finished.

ragoo88

Aug 4, 2008

is this REALLY that surprising at this point...inrainbows.com has been off for like months now...so where do u expect most people who don't want to actually go out and buy the album want to go to get the album??answer: illegal peer to peer websites....sometimes i wonder if u people r really this stupid, or just are bored and have nothing else to write....ohhhhh, right, both.