Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool reaches Spotify nearly six weeks on

A Moon Shaped Pool is on Spotify from today, Friday 17 June, the day the record reaches shops on CD and vinyl. Last week Eamonn Forde of the trade newsletter Music Ally reported that Spotify had been in advanced talks with the band's team to make it the first album on the service open only to paying Premium subscribers. That would have broken Spotify's rule that every release reaches free and paying users at once, the rule behind its public disputes with Taylor Swift and Adele.

Jonathan Prince, Spotify's head of communications, told Music Ally that the company had looked at new ways of serving both kinds of listener for this album, and had ultimately decided that we couldn't deliver on those approaches technologically in time for the album's release schedule¹¹.

The album came out on Sunday 8 May as a download and streamed that night on Apple Music and Tidal, neither of which has a free tier. Spotify, which does, had only the two songs released ahead of it, “Burn the Witch” and “Daydreaming”, and said it hoped to add the rest as soon as it could. In the US the album was on Pandora, the internet radio service, from the start, and Pandora's own figures put Radiohead past one billion plays there.

Spotify had been losing Radiohead records too. On 4 May, the day after “Burn the Witch”, The King of Limbs disappeared from it, along with “The Daily Mail” and “Staircase”, the two-track release that followed the album. All three stayed on Apple Music and Google Play, and XL offered no reason. A month earlier the B-sides and other non-album tracks of 20 years had gone from streaming services as the catalogue moved from Parlophone to XL.

On 8 June a notice on Radiohead's Spotify page told listeners to come back on the 17th. Late the next night In Rainbows, the 2007 album first sold as a download for whatever buyers chose to pay, appeared on Spotify for the first time.