Radiohead put “Supercollider” and “The Butcher” on streaming

“Supercollider” and “The Butcher” went up on Spotify and the other streaming services on Thursday 17 November. The two songs came out on a 12-inch for Record Store Day in April 2011, from the time of The King of Limbs, and they are the last of a run of uploads this autumn. Two gaps are left: “Pop Is Dead”, the 1993 single that never made an album, and the Collector's Editions of the early albums that EMI and Capitol put out without the band's approval. The Line of Best Fit calls both deliberate.

The B-sides on the deluxe editions came off the services in April, when the catalogue up to 2003 moved from Parlophone to XL, and XL said the albums came first and the rest would be put back together later. In Rainbows, never on Spotify before, reached it in June, a week ahead of A Moon Shaped Pool, which had been kept off it at its release in May. In October came In Rainbows Disk 2, the eight songs that had only ever been sold on the second disc of the 2007 discbox, with “Down Is the New Up” and “4 Minute Warning”.

The band also added the two one-off songs they put out in 2009, neither of them on any album. “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” is their tribute to Harry Patch, the last British survivor of the First World War trenches. They recorded it live in an abbey, with strings arranged by Jonny Greenwood, a few weeks before Patch died in July 2009 at the age of 111, and sold it as a £1 download for the Royal British Legion. “These Are My Twisted Words” was a separate release, given away free that August.

In 2013 Thom Yorke told the Mexican site Sopitas that Spotify was the last desperate fart of a dying corpse¹. The band's albums stayed on it all the same.

Back on the streaming services, 2016