6th
The point is that there is an awful lot of guessing going on here. I quite like the guess in the update at the end of the article. Greg Sandoval says
Greg Sandoval at CNET’s Crave blog reports that Radiohead typically made between $9 million and $20 million from album sales on each of its previous efforts.
Where is this math coming from? If Radiohead makes the typical (for a popular band with an exceptional contract. I’m giving Sandoval some serious benefit here)5% on sales, at $20 million the band is selling somewhere in the range of 23.5 million units per album. In the real world, we can look at OK Computer, possibly the most popular Radiohead album, and see that it was certified Triple-platinium in the UK (3 million) and Double-platinium (2 million) in the US and throw in 4 million for “other” world-wide sales, we have a generous 10 million units. At $16.95 average unit retail, we would be looking at about $8.5 million. Granted this is close to the lower of Sandoval’s estimated numbers, but this is the short math. With Radiohead’s proclivity towards extensive (read: expensive) packaging and other factors which the labels use to bleed potential payments to artists, Sandoval’s numbers seem high.
Well, this is still significantly more than the estimated $1 million Radiohead has draw in so far, but we are in the early weeks of the album’s release. We must also remember that there is still a forthcoming traditional packaged version of the album. Following analysts wacky-math we can take NBCUniversal’s claim of 8% (sorry, 55 minutes of searching could not dig up a citation. I am a poor writer, I know.) $12.5 million.
Good luck, Radiohead!
(Via Bill Israel)
