On the day that The Cure is set to receive the Godlike Genius award at The NME Awards in London, the group’s lipstick-smeared frontman Robert Smith has started an odd feud with Radiohead, belatedly blasting Thom Yorke’s band for allowing fans to set their own price for the MP3 version of 2007’s In Rainbows.
"The Radiohead experiment of paying what you want — I disagreed violently with that,” Smith said. “You can't allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don't consider what you do to have any value at all and that's nonsense.”
Even though the Radiohead album went to No. 1 when it was eventually released on traditional formats while The Cure only reached No. 16 with its last release, 4:13 Dream, Smith remains adamant: “If I put a value on my music and no one's prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan, it can't work."