Radiohead, a wildly popular UK band, shocked the music world by first dumping their record label and then announcing that they planned to make their latest album, In Rainbows, available digitally with a “pay what you think it’s worth” pricing model. You can get it today – Oct 10.

Could you make a product or service so satisfying that people would pay enough, voluntarily, to make it a profitable venture? Perhaps, but maybe that’s not the entire point. What Radiohead has done has created so much buzz that the influx of new listeners to the band may make any potential loss pale in comparison. They have also, according to many in the industry, defined the direction the entire music industry is headed. This strategy is big, fast, hot, fresh to your door in 30 minutes or it’s free, big.

Could you create a marketing strategy that would define your industry? Could you do something so big that your peers (not your prospects) would call you crazy? That’s the brilliance behind the Radiohead model and there’s one waiting out there for you to discover and launch.

It’s in the pricing, the package, the guarantee, the delivery, the repackaging, the service, the people, the marketing, it’s hidden, but it’s there. You catch a glimpse of it if you stop trying so hard to be like everyone else in your industry and look for a meaningful way to stand out.

Ben and Jackie at Church of the Customer wrote about this recently as well.
And a review of In Rainbows – after all it’s still sort of about the music