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Gonzo Adopts Open-Pricing For 'Crunchyroll' Downloads Date: 4/2/2008 |
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Taking its cue from the band Radiohead, Gonzo's parent company GDH is experimenting with an open-pricing, pay-what-you-think-it's-worth model for downloads of two anime series, The Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter, that will be available via the Crunchyroll Website. Each episode of the two 13-episode anime series will be available in a subtitled format on the Crunchyroll site during the same day that the episode airs on Japanese TV (see "Gonzo Series Available for Download"). The open-pricing system allows users to determine the price they pay in exchange for downloading the anime episodes. Last year the hip alt-rock band Radiohead offered its latest album of songs, In Rainbows, via an open-pricing model on the band's Website. The band has not released the amount it earned from the open-priced In Rainbows downloads, but analysts peg the price at around $5 (though when interviewed Radiohead fans generally claimed that they paid a good deal more). In Rainbows was downloaded some 1.2 million times, which demonstrates that, at the very least, open-pricing can attain volume (at least where Radiohead is concerned). Like Radiohead (and unlike a lot of other artists who embraced the open-pricing model) GDH and Crunchyroll are not planning to use a "suggested price," though the amount for an anime episode is likely to be a lot closer to the $1.99 charged by iTunes for a typical TV episode. In the case of Radiohead, the open-priced download was available for only a limited time. When the CD version was released, it immediately went to #1, indicating that if there was an impact on sales, it was not large enough to keep the CD from selling very well. It would not be surprising to see GDH license the series for U.S. packaged media sales; it will be interesting to see whether the downloads have an impact, positive or negative, on DVD sales. |
| Source: ICv2 |
