Radiohead is one of my favorite bands and to this day they’re still nowhere to be found on iTunes. While this might not be that odd for a few select bands of old like Led Zeppelin and The Beatles as they’ve long been beyond the dictation of a record company, all of Radiohead’s albums have been created under Capitol records which is under the control of EMI, the same EMI who was the first to partner with Apple to bring non-DRM tracks to iTunes.

You’d think a band like Radiohead would have been happy with such a move, but instead they are still refusing to see their albums on iTunes – why? Because they don’t like the idea of being forced to break up their albums into individual tracks that can be sold one by one on iTunes.

On one hand I can certainly understand this; many artists like Radiohead set out to make great albums, not great singles. However Radiohead does sell their albums on CD and this was the same debate that was had 15 or so year ago when that format began exploding in popularity. CDs came in and let listeners instantly skip songs on an album or go right to the one they wanted, with vinyl records and even tapes before it was a much more time consuming process to find the exact song you wanted if you wanted to skip tracks.

Radiohead has no problem selling CDs of their music, which users can easily rip themselves into iTunes and skip tracks to their hearts’ content. Interesting Radiohead’s frontman Thom Yorke also apparently has no problem selling his music on iTunes, as his solo release The Erasure, is on and was promoted pretty heavily on iTunes – and yes, you can buy its tracks individually.

I hardly ever buy individual tracks on iTunes, usually opting for full albums, but I still think Radiohead should reconsider their position here. They sell CDs, Thom Yorke sells his music via iTunes, so why is it not good enough for Radiohead?
[via TUAW and Macworld UK]