The competition to be Biggest Band in the World must be pretty fierce, so you can forgive U2 manager Paul McGuiness a little if he wants to downplay all the positive press heading Radiohead's way of late. McGuiness, while talking to BBC 6 Music about the plan of attack for U2's upcoming album, mentioned that Radiohead's pay-what-you-will model for In Rainbows in October had “to some extent backfired”:"Even though it was available on their own website for no money at all, if that was what you preferred to pay -- 60 to 70 per cent of the people who downloaded the record stole it anyway even though it was available for free."
Keep in mind that that 60%-70% figure is almost certainly exaggerated. Wired estimated that the ratio of In Rainbows website/BitTorrent downloads during the first week of release was 1.2 million/500k, which would mean that less than a third of the downloaders used piracy.Though that doesn't include downloads from other P2P networks, it also doesn't include the fans who would eventually pay for a hard copy of the album, either.
U2's new album, which will come out in October, will be released in the same old-same old manner, as McGuiness noted that U2 "still sell a lot of actual CDs." The band, however, "will obviously work with whatever technology is available to make the release of the new record as interesting as possible.”
McGuiness has a long history of being conservative with regard to the realities of new media, having called ad-supported music "beneath musicians" and calling on ISPs to blacklist illegal downloaders. [Gigwise]
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I love U2, but their stubbornness could end up being their downfall.