Radiohead Catalog Goes Digital For the First Time, But Not on iTunes

All Radiohead albums are now for sale as unrestricted MP3s at the U.K.'s biggest digital outlet, 7digital.com, marking the first time the band has agreed to sell its entire catalog on a major download site. The band continues to reject iTunes -- the world's largest digital outlet -- and other services, refusing to make individual tracks available for sale in addition to full albums, something iTunes requires of most artists. At 7Digital.com, users from the U.S. and anywhere in the world can buy all six Radiohead studio albums and live album I Might Be Wrong for seven pounds -- about $14 -- each, and one of about twenty-two official single releases, bundled with B-sides, for 1.79 pounds, or about $3.60. Individual tracks are not available. The move was a widely expected next step for Radiohead, who previously made full albums available at 7Digital-powered site warchildmusic.com, with a portion of proceeds going to charity, and temporarily made two albums -- OK Computer and The Bends -- available on iTunes a couple years ago. Last July, Clark Benson, CEO of industry research frim the Almight Institute of Music Retail told Rolling Stone, "Radiohead, by their next release, will probably come to some terms with iTunes."

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Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

More Song Stories entries »

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