Tasty Tees: Pay What You Want Stats Are In, No Really

by Andy on December 4, 2007

Remember a few weeks ago when I told you that Tasty Tees were making a tee based upon the ‘pay what you want’ ethos behind Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows? Well, if you missed it and want one, I’m afraid its tough luck, they’ve all been printed up and shipped out, and the stats are in…

Average price was $3.37.

20% paid a penny

25% paid a $1

The highest paid was $20

Frankly, this knocks my faith in humanity a bit, I was expecting more of the tee buying public, but kudos to whoever spent $20 on it, oh, and all those figures exclude the $5 shipping fee, so all-in the average was more like $8.37.

http://23psi.blogspot.com/ nick m
i’m with you on that. an average of $3.37 is way too low. i would have thought that it should be in the region of $10 to $12.
http://blog.fantasticbonanza.com Joe
I would have sent a personally written ‘FUCK YOU’ with each shirt to people who paid below cost… the side deal forums at Shirt.Woot are pretty frustrating, too. People are all ‘I like a lot of their designs, but $15 is too much!’ PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH THINGS COST. Sorry. It just frustrates me to no end.
http://andrewbowness.com Andy
You ain’t wrong Joe, I’d considered writing something about Shirt.Woot, member over there don’t seem to have any concept of what a tee costs just because the the Woot tee costs $10, but they’re selling about 1000 of each design (I think), which makes a big difference to whole sale prices, as you well know.
http://www.mingled.co.uk MiNGLED
According to the only statistics available (Radiohead have not yet released there own stats for the downloads), most people paid way less than the normal Â£10 album price and a majority paid nothing. While it can be seen as an admiral effort for Tasty Tees to ask the buyer to name the price, far too many people want something for nothing and if it’s totally legal, that makes them even happier. They don’t care about costs etc. if it’s offered for nothing then that’s what will get paid.
http://andrewbowness.com Andy
Yeah, but you should remember that the normal album price includes a big cut for the record company, money spent on promotion, etc. but with that album it seems like all they had to do to promote it was send out a press release saying “pay what you want, no really” and the world went crazy (though I’m sure a lot more went into it than that). Also, I think that people still think that there’s a lot less value in downloaded music than physically purchased CDs.
You seem more bitter about the whole thing than I do!
Austin
well its kind of a lame shirt. its a cool idea but its really boring to look at.
you might of gotten people to pay more had the shirt been a tad bit more interesting.
just my opinion though
http://andrewbowness.com Andy
Austin, I don’t think that the Tasty Tees guys are monitoring this post for feedback, they just linked to me because I wrote up a post about the stats (which they gave me).
http://www.tastytshirt.com toby
a little belated response but wanted to chime in on the idea behind the shirt… which dates to a yo la tengo concert at williamsburg music hall… YLT always allows for a little q & a between songs… a fan screams out “how much did you pay for the radiohead album?” which i thought a brilliant question… at which point i said lets drop that on a tee for fun… my buddy at the show in a smart ass way says hey why don’t you have people pay whatever they’d like for the tee (joking most likely)… interesting i thought, wrote the webpage, did up the design and decided to see just how much people would pay… as an aside i’m an business school grad student/tshirt entreprenuer so this was very much of interest to see how people would make their decision… while i ended up breaking even (to my surprise) i definitely had a lot of fun with this… cheers, toby @ Tasty Tees
and if anyone happens to be in nyc this wednesday the 16th april we have our new tshirt release: http://www.tastytshirt.com/liza_corbett.html
mehl
the cost of manifacturing shirts is usually so much, its amazing that people have such a hard time letting go of a couple more bucks, but at least it broke even.
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