Radiohead announced Monday that it will release its eighth studio album, The King of Limbs, and allow fans to download it beginning Saturday from http://www.thekingoflimbs.com/DIUSD.htm.
Unlike the 2007 release of the British quintet’s previous studio album, In Rainbows, however, Radiohead fans will have to pay for downloads of The King of Limbs. An MP3 version of the album, at a high-quality audio rate of 320 kilobits per second, will be available for $9 and a Waveform Audio File Format or WAV version (CD quality) will be sold for $14.
Special-edition physical copies of the album — advertised as the “”world’s first Newspaper Album”” — will be made available through the Web site May 9, for $48 (with MP3 download) or $53 (with WAV download), that include a CD, two 10-inch vinyl records and extensive artwork.
Standard CD and vinyl versions of the album will be made available March 28 in retail outlets through a partnership with XL Recordings, with whom Radiohead collaborated to release In Rainbows. Before the physical release of In Rainbows, the band made the music available as a free digital download from its Web site, but at a lower bit rate that dissatisfied some audiophile fans. Despite being available for free for two months, the album went on to sell more than 3 million copies worldwide and became one of the band’s most popular releases.
