U2 Manager Criticizes Radiohead

U2's manager has gone on record saying that Radiohead's self-released album, In Rainbows, backfired, and went on to say that the supergroup's next album won't be given away for free.

Paul McGuinness called Radiohead's innovative strategy, which was adopted in the light of declining record sales and increasing piracy, a failure. This is because even though fans could dictate how much they'd pay for the album (some even for free), many people still obtained the album illegally.

"Sixty to seventy percent of the people who downloaded the record stole it anyway," he told BBC 6 Music's Music Week, "even though it was available for free."

Addressing how the upcoming U2 album will be released, McGuinness said, "We will obviously work with whatever technology is available to make the release of the new record as interesting as possible. [But] for U2, physical sales are still an enormous part of our business and we still sell a lot of actual CDs."

Their next album will be a follow-up to 2004's Grammy-winning How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.