Go ahead, name your price to keep reading this column.

What’s that, $1? Sold to the kid in the back wearing the Napster shirt. Sorry, couldn’t hear you, sir … 30 cents a paragraph? Deal. Next … wow, $50! Thanks, mom. And for you, Mr. Yorke … one penny? That sounds reasonable enough, just as long as you’re OK with a 90-cent tax for using a credit or debit card.

Until now, this column coincided with your Internet provider’s fees, or maybe only that of a newspaper subscription. But no longer. Radiohead changed all that this week by announcing that its seventh LP, “In Rainbows” would be sold digitally through the band’s Web site at a name-your-price basis. For a band that for so long has seemed to go out of its way to alienate audiences, this was a pretty fan-friendly move.

Starting on Wednesday, the Oxford, England quintet will sell tracks as downloads through www.inrainbows.com at whatever individual browser-savvy fans are willing to spend. Maybe Thom Yorke and crew have decided that they’ve garnered enough cash as one of the biggest bands in the world during the past 15 years, that record sales no longer matter. But if they’re banking on the public’s conscience to kick in right before people enter 1 pence (2 cents) as their bids, they should double check the Recording Industry Association of America figures.

You know, those same RIAA figures that say record sales have declined steadily since 2000, and that they dropped a whopping 20 percent in the past year alone. Or maybe Radiohead should consult some employees of its former label, EMI, which the group parted ways with before recording “In Rainbows.” More than 5,000 label workers have been laid off since the start of the sales decline, while the number of major labels has decreased from five to four. But it shouldn’t matter to Radiohead, because with about 3,000 record stores closing in the past seven years – including Tower Records, Sam Goody and Fopp Records – there are fewer places to sell the soon-to-drop LP.

Funny how the last great Radiohead record, “Kid A,” corresponds with the start of this drastic sales drop. That’s not saying the band’s turn toward electronic blips and moaning clips has had anything to do with that slump. In fact, the two follow-up releases – “Amnesiac” and “Hail To the Thief,” in 2001 and 2003 respectively – each topped the U.K. charts and broke the top three here in the States. But now, all that has changed; Radiohead is contributing to the death of the album. And worse, the band is trying to do exactly that.

By offering “In Rainbows” as a digital-only package on its Oct. 10 release date, the former-greatest band on the planet is helping to further the end of physical, hold-it-in-your-hand products. Yorke has mentioned (Threatened? Promised?) for years that his band might stop releasing full-length records, opting for more cost-efficient singles. The Irish power-pop outfit Ash made similar claims this year, saying that the band’s sixth album, 2007′s “Twilights of the Innocents,” would be its last LP and that the group now would record only A-sides. No doubt, this sales approach will be watched by industry executives and mimicked the world over if it succeeds, much the way that the iTunes model became industry standard. And from the first days’ figures, it’s on pace to be a resounding success. The band’s site has been slowed to a halt as traffic from every corner of the globe has all but frozen the servers amid a pre-ordering frenzy. Billboard’s “The Buzz 100,” which tracks Internet chatter on blogs and other media outlets, has Radiohead jumping to the top of the list from No. 13 since news of “In Rainbows” surfaced this week.

Yet something happened that all us anti-downloading skeptics predicting that this would mark downfall of hardcopies didn’t expect. Preliminary figures show that more people have pre-ordered the “discbox” version over the cost-cutting digital download. This second option for “In Rainbows” includes a CD copy of the album, and a 2×12″ heavyweight vinyl pressing of it, a second enhanced CD with additional songs, digital photographs and album artwork, and a lyrics booklet, all of which will be encased in a hardback book and slipcase.

Its cost isn’t negotiable – about $80 less negotiable – and will take a bit longer to arrive than the straight-to-your-harddrive downloads, as it will be release on or before Dec. 3. Though it surely won’t fit on your shelf alphabetized neatly between “Hail To the Thief” and “Kid A,” it’s nice to know that an option exists for the neurotic collectors out there. And its even nicer to know that those people who aren’t ones still are willing to cough up a pretty hefty chunk of change to get their hands on an excessive deluxe release, just as long as they truly love the band.

Maybe that’s the lesson we all should take from the “In Rainbows” experiment. That as long as people think it’s going to be great, they’ll be willing to buy it. Now if we only could get them to take the same financial leap of faith on things that are merely good, there might be a few more bands given careers with a opportunity to mature into something marvelous – like transitioning from the hit-or-miss “Pablo Honey” into the perfect “The Bends” and “OK, Computer.”

But for now, we’ll all be forced to sit back and watch how this plays out. But as of Wednesday, it won’t cost fans as much to do so.

Northwest Herald, Oct. 4, 2007