Radiohead’s pioneering pay-what-you-like In Rainbows album was bought three million times across all formats and sold more physical CD copies than the band’s last two records, despite its initial availability online at potentially no cost. That startling fact came from from Jane Dyball (via MusicAlly), head of business affairs at…

Some 2.3 million people skanked Radiohead’s latest album from BitTorrent sources during the two months it was legally available for free. A research paper from P2P monitor Big Champagne and the UK’s MCPS-PRS royalty collector said the “staggering” number “far exceeds what outsiders have reported as the estimated download total…

Now that the extravagant “flowers” bill has come down, EMI’s turnaround certainly looks on track. The label may not have to report its earnings publicly since it was taken private by Guy Hands’ Terra Firma, but Hands sent a letter to staff to say it clocked Q1 pre-tax earnings of…

Best Of compilations usually are released when an artist dies, a band needs to fulfil a contract or a label is trying to make cash off a recently-departed group. In the case of the still-simmering cauldron of resentment that is Radiohead-EMI, it’s the latter. On June 2, the record company…

UK rock group Coldplay made its new single, Violet Hill, available for free for a week from yesterday at coldplay.com - and is already finding the move is paying off. Last.fm told us it tracked 33,000 plays - or, one every two seconds - in the first day of availability.…