Radiohead's first six albums move to XL, and the B-sides vanish

Radiohead's six albums from Pablo Honey to Hail to the Thief switched to an XL Recordings credit on Spotify, iTunes and other services on Monday 4 April. On 5 April XL confirmed the move. This is the first step in the transfer of Radiohead's back catalogue from Parlophone to XL. The main albums are being made available in their original form as a start, before non-LP material is reconfigured.¹

XL already releases In Rainbows and, outside North America, The King of Limbs, as well as Thom Yorke's The Eraser and Atoms for Peace's Amok. According to Complete Music Update, the band fell out with EMI after the private equity firm Terra Firma bought it in 2007, and the early albums passed to Warner Music when it bought Parlophone for £487m in February 2013. To win the independent labels' support for that purchase, Warner promised to sell, license or hand the distribution of a quarter to a third of Parlophone's business to independents. Billboard believes Radiohead's is the first Parlophone deal under that promise to be done.

The non-album material has gone from the streaming services for now. Several dozen B-sides, live tracks and rarities from the Collector's Editions that EMI put out in the 2000s, without the band's involvement, have dropped off, “Fog”, “Palo Alto”, “Gagging Order”, “Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong”, “The Trickster” and “How I Made Millions” with them. Spotify puts the gap down to a change in who owns the rights, and told Music Ally the albums were passing from Warner to Beggars Group, XL's parent company. An Apple Music playlist of the band's 1990s B-sides is down to two songs.