A new way to sell music

Mashable.com reported that Radio Head earned 1.2 million dollars in their first week of sales for their new album “In Rainbows.”  The interesting thing is that they did not charge a set fee for e price of the album.  People are able to download it for the price they think it is worth.  They got an average of $8 for each album purchase, and did not have to give a recording label a penny of it.  They sold directly  to their fans and made roughly $10 million.

Who knows what this will do to the music business, but one thing is for sure- times are changing.  I love the fact that they are acknowledging the reality of what’s going on in their business (illegal downloads) and rather than complain about it, are doing something new to work around it.

I think we can learn from this in our ministry practices.  Rather than complain that people “aren’t committed enough” or “don’t love God enough”, we can change our systems to help them do what’s right.   Andy Stanley did a great talk about systems at the last Drive Conference.  I would highly recommend it.  You can buy that talk here.