Radiohead on Not Being Attached to a Major Record Label 18 years ago by Martey Dodoo

Pitchfork has an article about the fact the popular band Radiohead might be coming on tour to the United States. While the ability to see one of my favorite bands live in concert is pretty cool, I was even more excited to see that Radiohead is currently unaffilated with EMI, a member of the RIAA. While I acquired all of Radiohead's previous albums prior to making a promise not to buy albums from RIAA-affilated record labels, the idea that their new album might be RIAA-free is nice. On one hand, Green Plastic reports:

Our sources at Radiohead's US label, Capitol Records, have told us that they are asking Radiohead to record one more album as a favor to them since Capitol did them a favor by releasing the last Supergrass album. Supergrass and Radiohead share the same management, Courtyard Management. Whether or not another Radiohead album is released by Capitol still is unknown at the time.

But on the other hand, Thom Yorke, Radiohead's lead singer said:

It's really liberating not to feel part of the record company structure. It should be an extremely positive place to be in but it's also an extremely strange situation to be in.

"Strange" should be familiar to fans of Radiohead, who have evolved from standard 1990s rock music to electronic/progressive rock only to return to a more conventional sound. Since the same band that writes brilliant lyrics has a blog that reads like a 13-year old's Livejournal, I think releasing an album without a major record label would be a relatively minor decision, especially considering the fact that Radiohead is established enough that it is obvious that they would sell a large number of records regardless of whether they had the backing of a major label.