What happens when your fans love what you do so much that they’ll actually pay to promote you? We take a look at Radiohead’s recent remix competition.

Radiohead are about to announce the winner of their remix competition. Their fans were asked to remix the song, “Nude”. The individual tracks of various instruments and voices were sold on iTunes. In a previous article on Radiohead, we wrote that it would be interesting if they allowed fans to remix their work and finally a huge international band has listened to our call…

Each entry can be voted on, although, the winners won’t necessarily be the tracks with the highest number of votes.

Instead of aiming at the mass market, Radiohead have aimed the remix competition at a small section of people who are presumably already familiar with audio editing and music software. Over 2,000 people have paid to download the individual parts of a song. Could remix competitions lead to another revenue stream for bands?

Radiohead had a widget that each person entering the contest could put on their MySpace or Facebook page and also on their blog. A total of 2252 remixes have been submitted. At the time of writing, the top two tracks have over 20,000 votes each.

So, over 2,000 people have paid to promote the Radiohead single. The people taking part in the competition will undoubtedly send their finished remix to all their friends to listen to and might even use social networks and social news sites to promote their work. By holding the competition, they now have over 2,000 people sending the track to their friends and acquaintances and promoting the band at a grass roots level.

It’s not just a one way benefit for the band either. Each remix has its own basic profile page where a person can include the URL to their own site (although, it would be better if the link to each person’s site was underneath the song on the home page). Anybody who likes the remix might be tempted to check out their site and they could end up with a few new fans too.

While the remix competition has encouraged people to tell their friends about their own mixes, would the competition have reached more people if they had made it easier for fans to remix the track?

Many of the interactive toys on ZeFrank’s site work because they don’t require a massive amount of previous knowledge to make something that people want to send to their friends. I’m not sure how difficult it is to save and send a file in Flash, but an easy to use interactive tool would have meant that even more people would send the file to their contacts to listen to.

Would making it as easy as using Fruity Loops or something like these musical tools have lowered the quality of submissions? Perhaps Radiohead would rather have fewer people remixing the song if the overall quality is higher. Most people don’t want to spend time learning a tool, instead, they just want something quick, fun and easy to use.

So what do you think? Is it better in this case to enable a smaller number of people to remix the track or would it have been better to make it easier to have remixed song with a browser based tool? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

image credit: patrickwoodward