Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood wrote a piece on his band’s thoughts on music distribution for Index On Censorship, a UK magazine about freedom of expression issues. The piece is a good read if you’re interested in why they released In Rainbows the way they did, and how Greenwood read message boards and torrent sites to gauge fan reaction. But there was also a little nugget of information about when and how the band will release the follow-up to In Rainbows:

Three years later, we have just finished another group of songs, and have begun to wonder about how to release them in a digital landscape that has changed again. It seems to have become harder to own music in the traditional way, on a physical object like a CD, and instead music appears the poor cousin of software, streamed or locked into a portable device like a phone or iPod.

So don’t expect it to come out on an iPhone/iPad app. He ends by writing, “…We have yet to decide how to release our next record, but I hope these partial impressions will help give some idea of the conversations we’ve been having.” It does! But it also means it could come out any day though, through any of the ways he mentions he likes to get music (“… Spotify, iTunes, blog playlists, podcasts, online streaming…”). So anyway, that’s the news: a new Radiohead album, or group of songs, released in some format, sometime in the future. Ed O’Brien said it would be out this year.