Radiohead isn’t the only music brand looking to experiment with business models. Paste magazine has adopted the pay-what-you-want model for its yearly subscriptions for the next two weeks, with minimum payments starting at $1.
Paste’s president and publisher, Tim Regan-Porter, said he and his Atlanta-based staff had been tossing the concept around during their discussions of the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. On the day of Radiohead’s announcement to offer their new album “In Rainbows” exclusively online for an optional fee, the staff happened to be reading the book’s example of a company who let customers strike a line through their bills. “We saw it as a feedback mechanism, and sort of put that together with Radiohead and said, ‘That’s a great way for us to know how much our product means to people.'”
“If someone had a $50 budget and wants to pay us that much for a subscription, great. But I would rather get 50 $1 subscriptions than one $50 subscription,” Regan-Porter said.
[via Ad Age]