New Radiohead album available to download for 7 euros

Five days from now, Radiohead will present their new album ‘The King of Limbs’ online. Next Saturday, February 19th, their new record is available for downloading via a special website for the price of 7 euros. The band also announced that it launch the world's first 'newspaper album’. At this stage, we can only speculate about what this might look like.

Radiohead have been experimenting with of original ways to promote an distribute their music for a few years now. Buyers of their previous album had to apply for it online and decided for themselves what they paid for it. 'In Rainbows'(2007) went on sale for a minimum of 45 eurocents, the price of a credit card transaction. A few months later, ‘In Rainbows’ was physically distributed through XL, the band's own label. This time Radiohead does ask for a (modest) compensation for their work. Meanwhile, the band is working on a physical record, which they call a "newspaper album.<o:p></o:p>

It is still unclear what Tom Yorke and his friends mean by this term. However we do know that there is a special edition of the album as a classical 10" vinyl record, along with a few pages of large art works and some 600 pages of small works in a colorful and biodegradable plastic folder to keep it all together. <o:p></o:p>

The question now is whether this particular ‘newspaper album’ is distributed through a  to a newspaper, as the Dutch singer Trijntje Oosterhuis did recently, along with Prince that gave away his album ' Planet Earth' with British newspaper ‘The Mail on Sunday’.<o:p></o:p><o:p> </o:p>

Anyway, Radiohead managed to attract plenty of attention to their eighth studio album. Perhaps this excentric release strategy is the start of a grand tour of festivals next summer for the Oxford based band.

<o:p></o:p>Source: NRC