Music Ally has news of some numbers relating to Radiohead’s pioneering “pay whatever you want” experiment with their album In Rainbows. The stats come from a speech given by Jane Dyball, head of business affairs for the band’s music publisher, Warner Chappell, which as Music Ally notes took a substantial risk by allowing the group to offer downloads on that basis. The unfortunate part about her comments, however — which were made in honour of the one-year anniversary of the album’s release — is that they don’t really tell us a heck of a lot that we didn’t already know.

One of the first things Dyball says, according to Music Ally, is that the digital publishing income from In Rainbows “dwarfed all the band’s previous digital publishing income and made a ‘material difference’ to Warner Chappell UK’s digital income.” That’s not saying much, unfortunately. Before the downloadable album idea came along, Radiohead wasn’t on iTunes and hadn’t done anything much in the way of other digital sales either, so just about anything would have dwarfed all its previous digital publishing income. Making a “material difference” to Warner UK’s digital income means that it was pretty good, but again it doesn’t really tell us much.

The one concrete figure we do get is that there were 3 million CD versions of the album sold, whether through the In Rainbows site (which offered the CD or a special-edition boxed set) or through other digital music outlets. As Music Ally notes, that’s an impressive number given that the band’s previous albums sold in the low hundreds of thousands, and not bad for something Trent Reznor says was really “just a marketing gimmick.” But we get no information from Dyball whatsoever about the average price paid for the downloads, which is pretty critical when it comes to determining whether the experiment would make sense for others.

Just as Radiohead’s “pay what you want” download model is being adopted by more musicians and artists — including Nine Inch Nails, Coldplay, The Charlatans UK and others — the band that launched the model says it doesn’t plan to do it again, calling the release of In Rainbows “a one off.” In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, frontman Thom Yorke said that the offering last year arose out of a particular set of circumstances. “I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation,” Yorke told the magazine. “It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do,” he said.

Although the band hasn’t confirmed it, there was speculation at the time that Radiohead chose to release its new album online first because it knew that leaked tracks were going to make their way onto the Internet soon anyway. A number of other artists, including Gnarls Barkley, have been either moving up their release dates or offering free samples for the same reason. Yorke also said that he wasn’t sure such an offer “would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time.”

The band may also have been underwhelmed by the number of people who chose to actually pay for the album: according to a survey by the Telegraph of 5,000 users, about 25 per cent either paid nothing or only a small amount (as little as one pence). Thousands of fans also downloaded the album for free using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network, although some said they only did so because the official Radiohead download site was crippled by a flood of requests.

Coldplay experienced a similar phenomenon after the band released a track from its new album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends as a free download. According to several reports, the site crashed under the strain on Tuesday. More than 600,000 people downloaded the song in less than 24 hours, according to one report. Other artists have also announced plans to experiment with online delivery in some form or another; even Metallica — the band best known for its vocal criticisms of Napster in the early days of downloading — has said that it may look at offering new music directly to fans instead of using a traditional label.

Despite Radiohead’s statement about not offering “pay what you want” downloads any more, Yorke said the band was going to build on its online connection with fans. “We are about that direct relationship (now) because we are big enough to establish that,” he said. Among other efforts, the band has set up a music ‘mashup’ site where people can upload their own versions of one track from In Rainbows, and also has a social network based on Ning.com called W.a.s.t.e. Central, which has about 12,000 registered users.

Musicians dissing each other is nothing new — but it’s usually over their choice of wardrobe or girlfriends, rather than their commitment to new digital delivery methods. Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor likes to push the envelope, however, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he has been smack-talking about fellow alternative artists Radiohead and their online album experiment, in which they allowed fans to download In Rainbows and pay whatever they wanted (including zero).

In a recent interview (the full version is here), Reznor called the offer “insincere” and said it was a “bait-and-switch” tactic designed primarily as a “marketing gimmick,” since the band offered lower-quality sound files for download and admitted that most of their efforts were spent on the release of a traditional CD through the usual channels. Not Trent — he offered his latest album, Ghosts I-IV, online starting March 3 as a full download at CD quality for $5, with a range of other offers at extra cost, including a super-deluxe version for $300 that came with a CD, a DVD, a vinyl record, custom artwork and Reznor’s autograph.

Reznor has also one-upped Radiohead in another department as well: while the British band has been coy about just how many people paid for their album, and what they ultimately made from the experiment, the Nine Inch Nails singer/songwriter has been telling anyone who will listen what he made from the online release of Ghosts I-IV — which allowed fans to download nine tracks for free, pay $5 for the full 36-track release, pay $10 for a double CD or $75 for a special Blu-Ray DVD edition.

According to Trent, the band made $1.6-million from the experiment — including 2,500 versions of the deluxe $300 package — and fans engaged in more than 781,000 transactions (although individual buyers may have generated more than one transaction). That is almost certainly more than the Nine Inch Nails would have made from a traditional album released through a record label, plus Trent gets to stick it to Radiohead at the same time. And now he’s started a YouTube-based, user-generated video festival based around the album.

In other recent music-related news, R.E.M. will be streaming an online preview of their new album Accelerate through the music-sharing service iLike starting March 24 and continuing until the official release of the album on April 1.

Greg Sandoval over at CNET has a piece up about Radiohead and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and their experiments with “pay what you want” record releases. Greg is the guy who wrote the recent story in which Trent said he wasn’t that impressed by the response to his album (Reznor also mentioned the idea of an Internet tax to compensate artists for downloading, which I said was a dumb idea).

Sandoval’s headline says that artists shouldn’t miss the lessons that Radiohead and Reznor offer. And what are those lessons? Apparently, they are that musicians aren’t business people, and that “the music business is probably better left in the hands of businessmen.” The CNET writer goes on to point out that most musical acts fail — EMI says that only 5 per cent of its artists become profitable, apparently — and therefore artists still need the record labels to handle the business.

With all due respect to Greg, I think “the music business is better left in the hands of businessmen” is probably the worst advice I’ve heard in a long time. Do artists like Reznor or Radiohead need people with some financial acumen, or staffers who can handle the details of marketing, packaging, etc.? Of course they do. But it’s a long way from that to saying they should just remain shackled to the traditional record labels.

As for the line about only 5 per cent of EMI’s acts being profitable, that’s hardly surprising. For one thing, many of the label’s acts are unadulterated crap, which even millions spent on marketing and hype cannot spin into gold; and for another thing, the overhead of a traditional label like EMI is astronomical — for all the mid-level managers and their salaries and bonuses (never contingent on actual sales, of course). That’s presumably why the new owner is slashing and burning.

So pay attention to the lessons of Reznor and Radiohead, yes — it will be work to sell your own material, to market it and to profit from it. It’s not a licence to print money. But at least you can be in control of your own destiny to some extent.

This seems to be a real music-blogging day for some reason — first there was the RIAA vs. Washington Post post, then the Sony-DRM post, and now we have some stats from indie music darling Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails about his experiment with offering a “pay what you want” album for download. Not long after Radiohead launched its In Rainbows download, Reznor announced his intention to release an album by rapper Saul Williams (which Reznor produced) in the same fashion.

So how did it go? Mixed at best, it seems. Unlike Radiohead, which hasn’t said anything about how many people downloaded or paid for its album (apart from saying that the estimates from comScore were wrong), Reznor has provided detailed numbers, and it appears that less than 20 per cent of the people who downloaded the album paid for it.

As Mark Hopkins notes at Mashable, there are a whole bunch of reasons why this might be, including the fact that Saul Williams isn’t exactly a household name, that he and Trent Reznor don’t exactly have huge crossover appeal with each other’s audience, and so on. There’s no question that a “pay what you want” strategy is likely to work better for an artist with a solid, dedicated community, such as Radiohead.

That said, however, Saul Williams still got more than 150,000 people to listen to his album (compared with about 33,000 for his previous album) and got almost 30,000 of those who downloaded it to pay $5. Reznor says that after paying for the studio time and engineers and so on, no one is “getting rich” from the download experiment — but when did that become the sole motivation for making music? Chris “Long Tail” Anderson has some thoughts here.