The band’s been skeptical about streaming in the past, but the move to XL is about keeping their albums as they are and avoiding more ‘reconfiguration’

The day after former Parlophone labelmates the Beatles put their three Anthology albums – a ragbag of alternative takes and live versions of well-thumbed classics – on streaming services for the first time, Radiohead’s B-sides and rarities began disappearing from streaming sites such as Spotify.

XL Records have made 'first step' in transferring Radiohead's catalogue from Parlophone Read more

The expanded versions of all their albums up to 2003’s Hail To The Thief – the last release as part of their six-album deal with Parlophone/EMI – have been slimmed down to just the original running orders. Fans of Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), You Never Wash Up After Yourself and Faithless the Wonder Boy will have to revert to their CD versions for now.

Why is the streaming world being denied these songs that even Thom Yorke would probably struggle to whistle? As with all things Radiohead and online, it’s complicated. It is understood to be resulting from the transferral of their Parlophone albums from Warner Music (the major label that bought Parlophone in 2013 as part of the wider sale of EMI to Universal Music) to XL Recordings, the independent label that has released Yorke’s solo music and the band’s albums from In Rainbows onwards. Due to market and monopoly issues, Warner is required to divest certain catalogues from Parlophone, although why it would hand over one of the label’s crown jewels is a head-scratcher, especially given that Universal was able to winkle out the Beatles from Parlophone as part of its acquisition of most of EMI.

“This is the first step in the transfer of Radiohead’s back catalogue from Parlophone to XL,” read the official statement from XL. “The main albums are being made available in their original form as a start, before non-LP material is reconfigured.”

That last part, with its deliberately opaque wording, is the key component here. Radiohead are far from digital Luddites, as In Rainbows, with its pay-what-you-want release in 2007, admirably proves. But they have had a bumpy relationship with digital music’s impact on the actual shape of the album. They, like the Beatles and Pink Floyd, have tended to view the LP as a sacrosanct text and were initially opposed to the unbundling of the album on download services such as iTunes in 2003. Indeed, their albums only appeared on iTunes in 2008, and that may not have been entirely their decision, as they’d walked out of Parlophone a year earlier when they fulfilled their original contract terms. It is also understood that the band had little or no say in the expanded versions of their Parlophone albums that opportunistically appeared after they left EMI, when equity company Terra Firma bought it in its doomed attempt to breathe new life into the bedridden major.

Indeed, there was no love lost between the band and Guy Hands, the bullish head of Terra Firma. This rift was exacerbated by Hands looking to strike an exclusive retail partnership for their catalogue with, of all people, Next. That ham-fisted deal never materialised but it is understood that the repackaging of their albums and the release in 2008 of a Best Of album was done out of spite by Terra Firma and left a bad taste in the band’s collective mouth.

These are their albums and it should be their call how they are presented to the world

So this “reconfiguration” of the band’s albums on streaming services, given that they are presumably more hands-on with XL than they were in Parlophone’s Terra Firma years, could be read as a way of, if not totally rewriting history, certainly righting some perceived wrongs. While it seems positively archaic for them, in 2016, to still be so precious about the “shape” of the album, these are their albums and it should be their call how they are presented to the world. Not for them the ever-shifting and Lego-like release of something like The Life Of Pablo that seems less an album and more a case of Kanye West trying on a series of new hats.

It also marks something of an armistice between streaming services (or, more specifically, Spotify) and Thom Yorke. In 2013, he memorably called Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”, a turn of phrase that revealed he was no student of thanatology, seeing as corpses are already dead. Meanwhile XL, as part of Beggars Group, has had to perform a high-wire act with regards to streaming. Beggars head Martin Mills is a huge flag-waver for streaming, no doubt helped by the fact that the indie labels and the majors all have equity in Spotify; but he’s equally had to bow to Adele’s demands to keep 21 off Spotify for the first few years of its life as well as her refusal, for now, to let anything but the singles from 25 appear on streaming services.

Beggars also went public in 2012, at the height of artist-led attacks on streaming royalty rates, to say it was paying 50% of streaming revenue to its acts. This was news that would have raised at least some cheers from the rarely ebullient Yorke. It was, however, intentionally short-lived as that 50/50 split was, to draw on the word of the day, “reconfigured” in 2014, as streaming’s market value grew, into a new rate that saw Beggars taking an undisclosed fraction that was somewhat bigger than half.

While Yorke’s attacks on Spotify in the past were, he says, on behalf of smaller acts starting out, Radiohead are not exactly on their uppers when it comes to streaming revenue. Paranoid Android alone has been played over 22m times on Spotify, which, based on the service’s average payout of $0.007 a play, could have generated $154,000 in royalties. Even the enormously unlistenable Fitter Happier has been played just shy of 3m times on Spotify and should have earned $21,000.

Possibly, with OK Computer’s 20th anniversary looming next May, we will see a huge bells-and-whistles reissue campaign for their back catalogue that will make Bob Dylan’s 18-disc The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 box set look diffident. For now, though, you just get the original albums as the band intended. That is, apart from In Rainbows, which is currently absent from Spotify and other streaming services, appearing like a ghost at the banquet to remind everyone of the last time Radiohead “reconfigured” not just the album but also how people thought about paying for it.