Radiohead's Montreux 2003 concert goes to Eagle Rock with the festival archive

Eagle Rock Entertainment, an independent London company, has beaten the major record companies to the rights to the Montreux Jazz Festival's film archive, which includes Radiohead's concert at the Auditorium Stravinski on 5 July last year. Nothing from it can come out on DVD until the artist's record company agrees, Nic Hopkins reports in The Times.

The whole Radiohead concert, 1 hour 54 minutes, was streamed on the festival's website after the night, and there has been talk of a live DVD since July.

The archive holds 3,500 hours from 37 years of the festival. Eagle Rock's executive chairman, Terry Shand, says the company will spend tens of millions of pounds over the next 10 years making more than 100 DVDs. If Sony had won it, then EMI or BMG might have had concerns about how their artists were going to be reproduced.¹