According to Wired magazine, Radiohead have decided not to sell their new album on iTunes Store because of Apple’s policy of selling individual tracks.

Lord only knows, pretension is hardly a new attitude in the music industry, but when I read that, I had to chuckle at the assbackwardness of it all. If I were their record label, I’d be down on my knees begging them to recant.

I assume the band are OK with radio stations not playing the entire album in one go, and I assume they haven’t produced a music video for MTV encompassing all the tracks on the album. Yet somehow, the only medium in which the album must be consumed in its entirety is the one where there’s any significant revenue to be earned.

Millions of potential buyers will instead lift a copy of the album from a friend’s CD or from a free file sharing network. Better still, because they allow artists to insist on album-only sales, Radiohead will have the entire album up in DRM-free MP3 format on 7Digital, which really gives a leg-up to the bootleggers.

Will the next Radiohead album come with a waiver that must be OK’d stating that the purchaser agrees that ‘Radiohead is bigger than Jesus” before downloading? Or one that says, “I agree not to use the ‘next track’ or ‘fast forward’ buttons while listening to this album”?