Radiohead: "honesty box digital sales surpass all our EMI sales combined"

11:53 | Wednesday December 19, 2007

In an interview with Wired, in which Yorke is interviewed by Talking Head's David Byrne, Yorke says the decision to offer In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-like download was manager Chris Hufford's idea.

"It wasn't nihilistic, implying that the music's not worth anything at all," says Yorke. "It was the total opposite. And people took it as it was meant. Maybe that's just people having a little faith in what we're doing.

"The only reason we could even get away with this, the only reason anyone even gives a shit, is the fact that we've gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place," adds Yorke. "It's not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We're out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do?"

While Yorke does not reveal how much money the band has made from the honesty box scheme, he does say, "In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the net. And that's nuts. It's partly due to the fact that EMI wasn't giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff."

However Yorke makes no mention of the fact that Radiohead's material has been unavailable on iTunes - the market-leading digital retailer - to date, and that the band's EMI catalogue was only added to retailer 7digital in September.

On advice to new bands, Yorke adds, "First and foremost, you don't sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero. That would be the first priority.

"If you're an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment. Then again, I don't see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway."

Read the full interview here: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_yorke