When Radiohead made their latest album “In Rainbows” available for download on the internet and left it up to the person on the other end of the connection to decide how much (or not) to pay it was viewed as a bold experiment. Now the results are in and we know how many people decided to open their virtual wallets and purses and how much they thought Radiohead’s work was worth.

According to figures only 38% of people paid anything at all for “In Rainbows” with the average price per digital consumer working out to be $6. Among the citizens of the world Americans were the ones that felt it necessary to pay the most for the new Radiohead album, paying an average of $8.05 for it.

While precise figures for the exact number of downloads weren’t made available it’s been estimated that nearly 1.2 million people hit the site in October and a high number of them decided to download the record. Assuming that one-third of them paid up that makes it about $2.26 that Radiohead made for every download of their new work. While that figure sounds like peanuts consider that most well-known bands don’t make much money from album sales at all or as little as a dime per record sold. When you look at things that way Radiohead’s little experiment may actually turn out to be very profitable for the group.

via Tech Digest