I think it's more about being fair.

I think one of Co-opetition's (http://mayet.som.yale.edu/coopetition/index.html) main ideas has it nailed. While this doesn't involve business competitors, it's still about players of a game giving up maximizing their own individual gains, to share it with one another

in this case we can think of the consumer as a player of a game where they have three general choices:

a) maximum gain - pay nothing (assuming they don't buy anything else from RadioHead; Radiohead loses big) and enjoy the music

b) minimal gain - pay what they think is full price (buy extra stuff, ...) and enjoy the music

c) mixed gain - pay what they think is a discounted price (less than a cd) and enjoy the music; neither Radiohead nor the consumer maximize their gains in the short term but both of them benefit moderately. Radiohead has an incentive to keep publishing hits and the customer can keep enjoying them (without being robbed by the record industry).

You nailed it. Because we live in a society whose rules we'd like for the most part to uphold, we impose norms on ourselves and on others. Fairness is among the most important of those, and it's the foundation of many others.

Check out the Ultimatum game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game) for another example of the same desire to keep people's dealings fair.

Although we're not entirely there yet, I think the 'socialization' of the web has begun to pave the way for online tipping. As we begin to see the people through the content, we will become more apt to support them in order for them to keep supplying the content we enjoy.

The difference is perhaps that the band's marginal cost of serving you was basically zero, whereas for a waiter or a cab driver it was significant.

while digitized songs scale better than food or driving services, i'm not so sure that the cost of delivering it is basically zero

Well, just going by S3 rates, a 5MB song costs $0.0009 to deliver.

well it took years to build their fanbase with previous albums and touring; and I could be wrong but I think both recording an album and touring around the world have significant costs in both time and money which don't always result in fruition (big risk). Luckily it worked out for radiohead

That's why I was careful to specify marginal cost. What you're discussing is fixed cost.

you have me there - i just felt that you were making light of their fixed/sunk costs

[to be fair - I didn't specifically mention marginal costs in my arguments =) hehe ]

As well as create a successful startup. That's not the point.

It's a product not a service, so they work the same if their album is downloaded a hundred or a million times.