Taking its cue from the band Radiohead, Gonzo's parent company GDH is experimenting with an open-pricing, pay-what-you-think-it's-worth model for downloads of two anime series, The Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter that will be available via the Crunchyroll Website.  Each episode of the two 13-episode anime series will be available in a subtitled format on the Crunchyroll site during the same day that the episode airs on Japanese TV (see "Gonzo Series Available for Download").  The open-pricing system allows users to determine the price they pay in exchange for downloading the anime episodes.

Last year the hip alt-rock band Radiohead offered its latest "album" of songs, In Rainbows via an open-pricing model on the band's Website.  The band has not released the amount it earned from the open-priced In Rainbows downloads, but analysts peg the price at around $5 (though when interviewed Radiohead fans generally claimed that they paid a good deal more).  In Rainbows was downloaded some 1.2 million times, which demonstrates that, at the very least, open-pricing can attain volume (at least where Radiohead is concerned).  Like Radiohead (and unlike a lot of other artists who embraced the open-pricing model) GDH and Crunchyroll are not planning to use a "suggested price," though the amount for an anime episode is likely to be a lot closer to the $1.99 charged by iTunes for a typical TV episode.  It should be very interesting to see how this particular experiment works out.