It’s in their DNA. If the legendary British rock band Radiohead have got where they are today, it’s undoubtedly because of the sovereign quality of their music. But, fortunately, or unfortunately, that’s not everything these days. Marketing is always present. And it always has something to say.
That was never a problem for the group led by Thom Yorke. Quite the contrary: Radiohead is one of the music agents that have made the most of digital marketing in the Internet era.
Radiohead, pioneers in the era of digital marketing
In 2016, the eagerly awaited album A Moon Shaped Pool was not released following a standard method. Far from it. Radiohead suddenly cleaned up all its social networks. The profiles were empty. And overnight, the 11 tracks of the album appeared fully on their website and on some streaming platforms. The whole music industry was talking about Radiohead at the time. Marketing investment: zero.
Let’s rewind even more. The year 2007. Their album In Rainbows was the first album in history without a fixed price. Under the concept “pay what you want”, extremely ground-breaking in those times, Radiohead were pioneers in the democratization of music and in the adaptation to the 2.0 era, in which the purchase of music as such began to give way to online listening subscriptions.
A virtual theft leads Radiohead to publish unreleased material on their website
The band’s last big action, however, was not due to marketing. Radiohead has radically modified its website and turned it into a giant showcase. In it, we can find an infinite amount of unreleased material. All of it, available for free to all users.
According to Jonny Greenwood -a member of the group- in his networks, Thom Yorke was hacked and virtually robbed. The hackers tried to blackmail Radiohead’s leader: they asked for $150,000 for not publishing the material. We already know the reaction of Abingdon’s band.
Radiohead has opened the doors of the time machine to us: their concerts at Glastonbury 2003 or Pinkpop 1996, various merchandising (T-shirts dominate), all their records and demos and, in short, any archive material that Radiohead has preserved during these 35 years of career are available free of charge on their website.
Come and see; the doors are open.
(Cover Image: © Radiohead’s Official Website)
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