Thom Yorke says 15 people paid the £99.99 maximum for In Rainbows

Fifteen people have paid £99.99 for the In Rainbows download, the most Radiohead allowed anyone to pay, Thom Yorke tells Der Spiegel in an interview The Independent has now printed in English. Christoph Dallach and Wolfgang Höbel asked him the highest price anyone had paid. Until now, 15. And I swear the band members are not among that 15.³

Yorke himself paid nothing. He always pays for downloads, he says, but he took this one free from the band's site for his mother. I wanted to play my mum the new songs and downloaded them on to her computer.³ A journalist found out and reported that he doesn't pay for music online. Paying for his own record, he points out, would only move money from one pocket to the other.

He sees In Rainbows as a conscious return to the 45-minute album as a statement. In Rainbows is, at least in our opinion, our classic album, our Transformer, our Revolver, our Hunky Dory.³ He waves away talk that the release was a calculated advertising coup, and has had enough of hearing the band praised. I've heard it said that we are saving rock music so often over the past few weeks that I'm going to have it printed on toilet paper soon.³

Yorke won't discuss figures, but the band are not complaining, and those who paid nothing don't bother him; the idea was that everyone paid what the music was worth to them. The band own the copyright in the new songs, while everything they made before belongs to EMI, which he finds deeply unsatisfying. They always meant to put out a normal CD as well, and thought about making and distributing it themselves before deciding it was too difficult and going to a small label.

Asked about Second Life and MySpace, he says virtual worlds lay bare the isolation of internet users with too much time on their hands, and he would rather express himself in the real world. The band, he adds, never read what critics or bloggers write about them.

Yorke traces the band's return to a Friday on Glastonbury weekend, when he was stuck in traffic with the children in the back of the car and heard a radio poll in which 76 per cent of listeners named Radiohead as their best Glastonbury memory. He asked himself why he wasn't on that stage.