There’s been a humorous bit of indirect smack talk between Thom Yorke from Radiohead and EMI’s Guy Hands over Hands’ claim that the band were making big money demands of the label.

According to Hands, the band were looking for a deal that would have cost EMI in the region of £10 million for:

• A £3 million advance for the In Rainbows album.
• Rights to Radiohead’s last two albums, resulting in a £4 million loss for the label, and
• A guarantee of £3 million to market the new album internationally.

That’s some shopping list, but on the Radiohead website, Yorke speaks out against these statements, claiming that Guy Hands is lying.

we did not ask for a load of cash from our old record label EMI to re- sign.
that is a L I E.
The Times in the UK should check its facts before it prints such dirt.
whAT we WANTED WAS some control over OUR WOrK and how it was used in the future by them-
that seemed REASONAblE to us,
as we cared about it a great deal.

Radiohead’s manager, Bryce Edge waded into the debate also, saying “We couldn’t move ahead with EMI because Guy Hands irrevocably refused to discuss the catalogue in any meaningful way. We sold 25 million records and we have the moral rights over those six albums. We wanted a say in how they are exploited in the future. We were not seeking a big advance payment, or a guaranteed marketing spend as discussions never got that far.”

An interesting state of affairs to say the least, especially considering that the band then went on to offer the album to fans at whatever price they wanted to pay. Conversely, they’ve faced some criticism for the high ticket prices on their tour and also not disclosing sales figures for the In Rainbows album downloads.

And while they’ve made innovative use of the Internet for promotion and sales of the album, Thom Yorke has come out and said that to do an Internet only release would have been madness.

“We didn’t want it to be a big announcement about ‘everything’s over except the internet, the internet’s the future’, ’cause that’s utter rubbish.

“And it’s really important to have an artefact as well, as they call it, an object,” the musician added.

Not the best news for the Digg crowd, who were upholding the band’s Internet shenanigans as the way forward for musicians to bypass the evil recording industry. Guess they’ll have to find some other way of sticking it to the man.