The people who thought Radiohead’s name-your-price download experiment for In Rainbows wouldn’t work are idiots. Since it went live on Wednesday, the album has already been downloaded 1.2 (now 1.3) million times from the site – that’s just in 3 full days. That’s platinum, well on it’s way to multi-platinum in it’s first week.

While I’d agree that some of the success can probably be chalked up to the novelty of the idea, the folks who thought that everyone would choose ‘free’ if you were given a choice for how much you wanted to pay for music are simply wrong (free technically wasn’t even an option here, you had to pay at least 90-some cents for a processing charge). I’ve downloaded my fair share of ‘free’ music over the years, but have absolutely no problem – and actually prefer – paying for music if it’s a) a fair price and b) quality work – both of which Radiohead’s In Rainbow are.

I paid 4 pounds – about $8 – for In Rainbows, which I thought was fair – to maybe even a little more than fair given that there was no artwork costs, no packaging costs, and it was only 160 Kbps quality, but am very happy with the purchase. Sure beats the days where I would be buying $17 crap CDs in the 90s.

While this isn’t going to kill record companies anytime soon, it is an important first step towards making them realize that their business models need to update for the times – and I don’t mean Universal’s lame idea. Music should be about the music, not about the business and corporate BS, Radiohead’s In Rainbows managed to cut through all of that – if only briefly.