Colin Greenwood takes Napster's side on Newsnight

Colin Greenwood spoke up for Napster on BBC Newsnight on 27 July, in a debate about a California court ruling for the Recording Industry Association of America that forces the service to take down every copyrighted MP3 by midnight on 28 July. NME call Radiohead the first British band to speak out against the shutdown.

Greenwood has no wish to defend people making money out of the band's music, but he accused the major labels of refusing to face the change. the important thing is to embrace this technology and not put your head in the sand like so many record companies have done because it is not going away¹

The technology has given the band a new lease of life, he said, with concerts and webcasts from their studio online and videos they shoot themselves for a fraction of the usual budget. The labels will have to change with it and find other ways of earning, perhaps by taking Napster as the model for their own online ventures.

Radiohead's Barcelona show was on Napster in full the next day, and most of the European tour went up within hours. When they reached Israel three weeks later, the audience knew the words to all the new songs and it was wonderful¹.