Radiohead Sells 122,000 Copies Of In Rainbows In Its First Week

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Billboard is reporting that Radiohead has sold 122,000 copies of In Rainbows in its first week on the charts. From the article

Radiohead zooms to No. 1 this week on The Billboard 200 with "In Rainbows" (TBD/ATO), a week after a premature debut at No. 156 due to street date violations. The set sold 122,000 units in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, a dramatic downturn from 2003's "Hail to the Thief," which started at No. 3 with a career-best 300,000.

However, the comparison is somewhat unfair, as "In Rainbows" was available for several weeks in the fall as a "name your own price" download exclusively from Radiohead.com, and sales figures for that experiment have not been released.

My thoughts exactly. If anything, the figure is quite impressive, given the fact that not three months earlier, you could have had the record for the price of zilch. Furthermore, if you take into the account the fact that the most the band can earn is $2.00-2.50 for each physical copy sold, there's a chance that the band made more money from the downloads than they actually did from physical copies.

At any rate, read the rest of the Billboard article here.

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(Jonathan Graef)