In late 2007, all anyone interested in music industry could talk about was Radiohead. In October that year, the band quickly self-released their seventh album In Rainbows through their website and offered fans a “pay what you want” pricing structure that included the price of zero for a period of three months.
The band were hailed as visionaries, despite the many artists who had done something similar before. The difference was – Radiohead are popular. Having left their major label EMI prior to release, the band had no label contract. They still needed to sell physical copies of the album though, so two months later, XL Recordings licensed the album and put it in the shops. Similar deals were struck in other territories in the world.

Last week, the Bittorrent blog TorrentFreak highlighted the nasty repercussions of those deals. Despite largely giving their album away from free digitally (an estimate of 62% of people opted not to pay for the album), TorrentFreak says that industry representative groups Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) have been issuing takedown notices to fans who are sharing the album online recently.

Nothing too out of the ordinary there except for the fact that the songs were given away for free in the first place digitally, so what rights do the labels have to claim infringements against fans when they only have physical licensing deals? And what do Radiohead think of all this? At time of writing, there has been no comment from the band but it would be surprising to learn that the band supported such measures.
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