Thom Yorke on Music Distribution and Live Recording 17 years, 10 months ago by Martey Dodoo

The New York Times sits down with Thom Yorke, lead singer of the popular British alternative band Radiohead. While a large part of the article focuses on Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, a significant portion of it deals with Yorke talking about Radiohead's next album. Since Radiohead is no longer signed to Capitol Records, Yorke talks about the discussions the band had about how to distribute their next record:

"We were having endless debates, spending entire afternoons talking about, 'Well, if we do something, how do we put it out?' " he recalls. "It just became this endless and pointless discussion. Because in our dreams, it would be really nice to just let off this enormous stink bomb in the industry."

Eventually the band simply decided to postpone any decision about recordings, although it has decided to own its recordings and license them for distribution rather than signing a standard recording contract.

One could claim that Radiohead is only able to "go it alone" because of their global celebrity, and that less well-known bands are still dependent on major recording companies for promotion, which requires recording contracts. However, this train of thought is illogical, because most bands of Radiohead's stature do not leave their record label and produce music independently. This practice is only often seen among smaller artists.

The aforementioned New York Times article begins by describing Yorke's hotel room as having "a sleekly pretentious minimalism, 'but on the cheap.'" Such a statement could describe Radiohead itself, the world's biggest small-time band. While other mainstream artists complain about illicit online distribution of their unpublished music, Yorke seems fine with it.

Mr. Yorke doesn't mind that Radiohead's new songs are being recorded from the audience and posted online. "If it wasn't for the Internet, I think it would be complete murder" putting across so many brand-new songs, he says. "But you get the feeling that at least some people are familiar with some of it. Which makes the difference."