In a new blog on Radiohead's webpage titled "The End of the Beginning," the band announced yesterday that new album In Rainbows would be removed next Monday from the download site set up in October to sell the album. This album has sparked widespread media coverage because of this website and the method used to sell it: without the music industry. The "shut down" of the download site comes as the band prepares to market and sell the album in a more "traditional" way through retail stores, according to NME's reading of the blog.

Billboard also reported that the band has now entered into talks with Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)'s iTunes Store to sell the album in digital stores. It looks like the fan-oriented "pay what you want" feature will certainly be gone for good. Radiohead has apparently resisted a move to the iTunes Store because it allows consumers to "unbundle" albums, breaking up the continuity the band wishes to keep for every album. This has not kept other digital stores from selling Radiohead's albums; they simply do not allow the albums to be cut apart.

The "new" versions of In Rainbows will literally go on sale as the new year begins, with the physical CD release managed and distributed by TBD Records. Radiohead moving into iTunes would add another obvious omission from the store, but it does come at the expense of the experiment the band spearheaded in the last two months. It would be naive to expect any move by the band into iTunes to not follow in the same formatting as the download site had sold. The band's title for the change from their experiment to the "usual" methods seems very apt. Unfortunately, it feels like "the beginning" was more a test than a long-term change.