Clearly, Napster had not harmed its prospects, and it could be be argued to have provided invaluable promotional assistance. Previously, their best placing had been the lowly 21 achieved by OK Computer. An unflinchingly experimental album, significantly different in style from OK Computer and featuring no obvious singles, it was a challenging work, yet despite the millions of free downloads, it still became the band's first American chart-topper. This was proven in 2000 when tracks from Radiohead's Kid A appeared on Napster three months before the album's official release. Some felt the opposite was true in many cases – that the exposure afforded by file-sharing could stimulate sales. To date, they have instigated over 20,000 cases.īut not everyone believed Napster was entirely damaging to a record's sales potential.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) began sueing individual alleged file-sharers, an aggressive policy that backfired somewhat when the organisation appeared to be bullying victims including a 12-year-old girl, a 66-year-old woman allegedly downloading gangsta-rap, and, in 2005, a woman who had died the previous year, aged 83. And piling irony upon irony, far from having their aesthetic and political freedom compromised by the relationship, Radiohead have actually grown more artistically adventurous with each successive album, and remain one of the industry's most politically engaged acts. Ironically, it has been triggered not by penniless hippies in some inner-city squat, nor by indie-label firebrands, but by one of the biggest bands in the world, whose rise occurred under the stewardship of EMI, the UK's bastion of corporate entertainment for over three-quarters of a century. Now, as Radiohead offer their album In Rainbows to the world potentially for as little as a penny apiece, that revolutionary ambition is upon us. Ever since a cadre of politicised hippies tore down the fence at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, the more anarchically inclined of rock fans have demanded that 'music be free', contending that pop's position under the entertainment industry umbrella fatally compromises its aesthetic and political freedom.

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