‘In Rainbows’: the Radiohead album Thom Yorke said made more money than any other
It is difficult to remember a time when we didn’t have access to the instant gratification of streaming services, with analogue media still largely dominant, and the thought of ‘downloading’ an album from the internet feeling foreign, but in 2007, music distribution was in flux, and Radiohead was trying to do something about it.
Radiohead certainly had nothing to prove by this time. From when ‘Creep’ was blacklisted by BBC Radio 1 in 1992, the English band’s reputation was defined by their aversion to conformity. While their rebellion was perhaps not intentional, they inadvertently stood out, their sound resonating with the grunge factions and the classic rock purists and, with Thom Yorke’s pen, their songs grew into poignant tales of mental strife, political turmoil and disillusionment.
With each album since their debut, the band’s sound slowly evolved into more ambient and experimental territory, taking them from rock royalty to a band undefinable and, though still beloved and receiving acclaim, they became increasingly misunderstood. As Yorke told Mojo in 2001, following the release of their polarising fourth album Kid A: “We’re not trying to be difficult… We’re actually trying to communicate, but somewhere along the line, we just seemed to piss off a lot of people… What we’re doing isn’t that radical.”
Two album cycles later, they released their final album under EMI, becoming, as The New York Times called them, “by far the world’s most popular unsigned band”. In turn, the band was essentially free to consider their next move, without the confines of a conglomerate looming overhead. They retreated to London, Oxford, and rural Somerset, England, to continue work on their next project, their future still undetermined, and on October 10th, 2007, they self-released their seventh album, In Rainbows, as a digital download, where listeners could pay as they wished, even £0.
Radiohead became the first ‘major’ artist to utilise this relatively new pay-what-you-want model, receiving praise from fans and critics and resentment from other artists such as Lily Allen, who told Rolling Stone their choice was “arrogant” and Liam Gallagher, who said Oasis would give away an album for free “over my dead body”.
From today’s standards, where streaming services unfairly dominate music distribution and the downloading of music has become a normal pastime, the distribution of In Rainbows does not seem all that bizarre. However, thinking back to nearly two decades ago, their choice does seem like something that would be unsustainable, as well as strange for a band of their stature to choose, but after dealing with album leaks for years, why not leak their own album instead?
In a conversation with Wired the same year, David Byrne asked Yorke about the aftermath of In Rainbows’ controversial release, particularly how much money Radiohead made as a result, to which York revealed, “In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever, in terms of anything on the Net. And that’s nuts. It’s partly due to the fact that EMI wasn’t giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff.”
Yorke also explained that their choice allowed them to bypass the media circus that would inevitably swarm the album’s release, subverting the charts, avoiding premature reviews from critics and conducting their own marketing for a direct connection to fans that Radiohead hadn’t experienced before. On release day, In Rainbows was downloaded an estimated 1.2million times, with roughly 40% of these downloads being paid for. Radiohead also had ownership of the master recording for the first time in their career and thus, were able to license the album for a record label to distribute on CD, which was released in the UK that December.
The frontman reasoned, “It was simply a response to a situation. We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.”
In hindsight, Radiohead were operating in a peculiar time for music, where the future of listening was slowly being pulled from the hands of the artists and record labels, into the unseen arms of the internet, and their decision showed that they would remain a band that took risks, preferring to be unpredictable.
