This morning’s Observer column…

A few weeks ago, the band Radiohead made waves by making their new album In Rainbows available online as a free download. But people could also decide how much they wanted to pay for it. This experiment was greeted with gleeful incredulity by many cynics, who opined that Radiohead had showed a touching but naive faith in human nature, and predicted that freeloaders would so outweigh the paying customers that the experiment would be a financial flop….