Radiohead's experiment has moved the goalposts.

Different criteria will be needed to assess success as seismic shifts redraw the lines in the music industry

Judging the success of a frontline artist used to be largely a simple matter of checking the chart position and sales of their most recent album or single.

But, as the revenue-making options for acts open up to all sorts of new possibilities, making an assessment of success in so glaringly simple terms will only tell you one part of the story and can even give an entirely misleading impression, for better or for worse.

Take Radiohead. After the acres of press coverage their new album attracted last autumn, many months before it was finally given a traditional physical release, you might have expected In Rainbows to have made a slightly bigger sales splash than the somewhat modest 17,000 takers it attracted during its opening two sales days last week.

Although no doubt welcomed by retailers in what is typically a quiet trading week after the excesses of Christmas, those sales could prompt the argument that the daring experiment of first allowing consumers to name their own price for a download version of the album (and that price, of course, could be free) has not been a success.

But to do so is only judging the project based on narrow, old-fashioned criteria. Although in pure physical terms the album has not been a runaway best seller (it was only about 4,000 sales ahead last Tuesday of Take That's 13-month-old album as it looked to match 114,000 week- one sales of predecessor Hail To The Thief), to assess properly how well In Rainbows has done you have to take into account other factors, too, not ...