Planet Simpson author pays 350 dollars to quote Radiohead

Chris Turner, author of Planet Simpson, a book about The Simpsons, paid Radiohead's publisher 350 US dollars to quote 87 words of their lyrics, he writes in an essay on his website. His licence, from David C. Olsen, director of business affairs at Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc. in Miami, covers lines from “The Bends”, “Idioteque” and “I Might Be Wrong”, and the fee includes one free copy of the book. Warner Bros. Publications is the company that, with Warner/Chappell, asked At Ease to take down its lyrics and song archive in June 2003.

That comes to about 4.02 dollars a word, more than double the best rate any magazine or newspaper has paid Turner to write. Yet on page 219 he quotes 15 words of “Karma Police”, five of “Paranoid Android” and 18 of “Subterranean Homesick Alien”, and was charged nothing. Either OK Computer is free to quote, he reasons, or somewhere around 20 words fair use turns into a bill. Nor did he pay a cent to quote The Simpsons itself, Foucault, Mark Twain or David Foster Wallace.

Radiohead are the only artists in the book he has met. In August 2001, the night before the band's show at Molson Park in Barrie, he joined them at dinner at the Mercer Street Grill in Toronto, talked with Jonny Greenwood and handed out copies of his Shift magazine cover essay, “Why Technology Is Failing Us (And How We Can Fix It)”. The next night Thom Yorke introduced “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” with a line about commuters stuck in traffic, and later quoted an ozone-hole figure from the essay. Backstage, Yorke came over to say he loved it.

MegaStar picks the story up on 22 November under the headline “Fork out for Yorke”, with the charge pinned on Radiohead.

the members of Radiohead who actually wrote the songs I cited in my book would've happily allowed me to quote from them free of charge

Chris Turner¹