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18 Nov 08

Radiohead had made more money before ‘In Rainbows’ was physically released than they made in total on the previous album ‘Hail To the Thief’.
The topline figure, though, is that there were three million purchases of In Rainbows, including physical CDs, box-sets, and all downloads - including those from the band’s own website and from other digital music stores.
3 more annotations...
- It’s clear that the BitTorrent downloads did indeed greatly outnumber those from Radiohead’s official site. But this was almost certainly always likely to be the case and all of this should not negate the ’success’ of the experiment.
- there were a total of three million album purchases including the box sets, CDs and all downloads including iTunes and pay-what-you-like downloads via their official site. That’s an incredible number, given that their previous three albums sold in the low hundreds of thousands.
- THE STATS
  
  • After being made available for free for 3 months the album was no.1 in the UK and in the US
  
  • 1st Radiohead album on iTunes – no.1 album selling 30,000 units in the US in the first week
  
  • The physical CD has sold 1.75 million to date and is still top 200 UK & US
  
  • They sold 100k boxsets via W.A.S.T.E.
  
  • Nearing 17 million plays on last.fm
  
  • 1.2 million fans will see the tour

Earning a considerable amount more than they did on their previous album with nearly 1.75 million physical albums sold and 3 million copies sold total, Radiohead has earned the right to mark this down as a rousing success. It should also be noted that they made more money off of the digital distribution of ‘In Rainbows’ than they did on their previous album, ‘Hail To the Thief’ which only sold somewhere in the low hundred thousands.