Wired Mag David Byrne Interviews Thom Yorke.

Yorke claims Radiohead benefits little from the traditional album set up.

That’s what major labels do, yeah. But it does us no good, because we don’t cross over [to other fan bases]. The main thing was, there’s all this bollocks [with the media].

Press people cut and paste from the first review….

We were trying to avoid that whole game of who gets in first with the reviews. These days there’s so much paper to fill, or digital paper to fill, that whoever writes the first few things gets cut and pasted.

Whoever gets their opinion in first has all that power. Especially for a band like ours, it’s totally the luck of the draw whether that person is into us or not. It just seems wildly unfair, I think.

Yorke discusses the ‘pay what you want’ experiment..

That was [manager Chris Hufford’s] idea. We all thought he was barmy. As we were putting up the site, we were still saying, “Are you sure about this?” But it was really good. It released us from something. It wasn’t nihilistic, implying that the music’s not worth anything at all. 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 ‘pay what you want’ experiment only works for Radiohead..

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. 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? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.

Yorke gives his insight for bands that are getting started..

Well, 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.

On touring….

We always go into a tour saying, “This time, we’re not going to spend the money. This time we’re going to do it stripped down.” And then it’s, “Oh, but we do need this keyboard. And these lights.” But at the moment we make money principally from touring. Which is hard for me to reconcile because I don’t like all the energy consumption, the travel. It’s an ecological disaster, traveling, touring.

The Bottom Line: This is was a nice discussion about business, but what about the music? Radiohead and their camp did an excellent job shaking the cage with the ‘pay what you want’ experiment which became the biggest story and headline in 2007. I just hope that the music and art will be the headline in 2008.