New Radiohead CD Hits Stores

Radiohead singer Thom Yorke says the British band did really well releasing its new album online but it would have been mad not to release it in stores too.

The group famously sold its latest offering, In Rainbows, on its Web site — months ahead of its release in record stores on CD and vinyl Monday — inviting fans to pay what they wanted for the album online.

Yorke told BBC Radio 4′s Today program it would have been stark raving mad to sell only a digital version of the set, since 80 percent of consumers still buy physical releases.

We didn’t want it to be a big announcement about ‘everything’s over except the Internet, the Internet’s the future,’ ’cause that’s utter rubbish. And it’s really important to have an artifact as well, as they call it, an object, Yorke said in the interview. We have a moral justification in what we did in the sense that the majors and the big infrastructure of the music business has not addressed the way artists communicate directly with their fans.

Yorke declined to reveal how many people downloaded the album, but he said, It’s been a really nice surprise and we’ve done really well out of it.