Radiohead's "In Rainbows" Changed Music Forever

Is this the most influential album release ever?

You’d think it would be simple.

Take all the buyer-entered values, export them in a text or spreadsheet file, tally them all up, and there’s your sales figure. But, like the existential floodgates it opened, the result of Radiohead’s game-changing rollout for In Rainbows is more complicated than it may seem at first.

At least one source suggested the band made a cool £3 million in sales from the digital version of the album alone. Other reporting said more than 60% of downloaders paid nothing (or close to it) for the record, though the group later dismissed that narrative entirely. However, even if someone did pay something for it up front, many obtained the tracks for free. The estimated piracy traffic topped 2.3 million less than a month after its digital debut on the band’s website, with nearly a quarter of those coming in its first day of availability. Going on numbers alone, no one can be sure how profitable a gamble this “pay what you wish” offer was.

Well, no one except Thom Yorke. In December 2007, he provided the most eye-popping revelation of all: In Rainbows had, to that point, generated more e-commerce revenue for the band than the digital sales of all its previous LPs combined. It’s an astonishing claim if you consider where the music industry was at that moment in time. Napster was dead, but peer-to-peer file sharing was still alive and well, legal consequences be damned. For those unwilling to commit a felony, there was the iTunes Store, a digital music marketplace that had sold over three billion songs, a figure that amounted to nearly 90% of the legal download market share in the US alone. Unless you were an artist trying to make a living off your music, you had options.

In addition to completely reinventing music distribution by proving that artists could have end-to-end control over the rollout and profits, there’s the “surprise drop” angle to all this. Before In Rainbows, no one thought you could instantly drop new material into consumers’ laps. There were many other factors to consider, including pre-release marketing and radio airplay. I know the latter sounds prehistoric in the streaming era, but it’s true. The comparatively microscopic ramp-up is an approach that hundreds have emulated since then, frequently to great effect. But, in 2007, it was mind-blowing. I remember music blogs scrambling to update homepages to trumpet the news immediately after it was announced on the Radiohead website and thinking, “Can they really do that?”

I’ve been going back and forth on whether this phenomenon impacted the listening experience positively or negatively, if at all. On the one hand, the targeted delivery system made the listening experience more intimate than it had ever been. You didn’t have to wait in lines at your local record store or even leave your home. Instead, the new tracks could be downloaded and added to your playlists in seconds. It sounds isolating, but it’s not like I was the only one who experienced In Rainbows this way initially. Millions of folks grabbed the digital download, crashing the band’s website on its first day of availability. Does that make it individually isolating or communal in the most global sense? Maybe, for the first time in modern music history, fans were able to have it both ways.

All that said, I don’t think any of these contextual elements, groundbreaking as they were, would’ve meant as much culturally if the album itself was mediocre. At the time, it felt like Radiohead needed … maybe not a huge smash hit like OK Computer, but certainly a return to form after the qualitative grab-bag that was Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief. The latter saw the group attempt a dense protest album but, despite that record’s highlights, ended up with something that came across as tentative for the first time since maybe Pablo Honey. There’s an indifference that permeates large portions of the LP, leading to ideas disappearing as quickly as they were introduced. Not so with In Rainbows.

From the opening stutter of “15 Step” to the stark, haunting beauty of closer “Videotape,” this album is the tighest, best-sequenced release in the band’s discography. It’s so impeccably woven together that, after pressing play, it’s almost impossible not to listen to it all the way through. Each song begins with a captivating sonic hook and, for the most part, piles one intriguing layer after another on top of that initial brow-raiser. In lesser hands, some of those experimental moments would’ve fallen flat. The xylophone hits on “All I Need” add a whimsical quality to what is otherwise a vaguely sinister-sounding track, a double-reverse of sorts when you consider the lyrics are on the sweeter side (”I am a moth who just wants to share your light”). It should be more jarring than it is, especially coming after Jonny Greenwood’s white-noise string section intro, but, as one of several outstanding editing choices, it all works.

My favorite aspect of this record is how intimate and vulnerable it sounds more than 15 years after its initial release. The occasionally icy distance Radiohead had put between themselves and the listener, a mechanism that drove them to new creative heights with Kid A, is replaced by Thom Yorke and the rest of the band wearing their emotions on their collective sleeve. This approach may have had as much to do with maturation as anything else.

Consider “Nude,” the album’s crowning achievement and the definitive version of what had become a fan favorite in their live sets. A holdover from the OK Computer sessions, the long gestation period meant the group abandoned multiple versions of the track in the intervening years. According to producer Nigel Godrich, changes on a human level changed the song for the better, not any studio trickery or slicing and dicing.

“Songs have a kind of window where they are really most alive – and you have to capture it. Nude missed its window, and it took a lot of reinvention to bring it back to the place where we could capture it again in a way that resonated for the people playing it. It was essentially the same song; nothing had really changed. What has changed are the people playing it.”

Creatively and commercially, In Rainbows is proof that the “how,” “where,” and “why” of an album’s rollout informs its essence and, to a degree, its reason for existing entirely. Would Radiohead have pulled out all the stops had they dropped this LP during their six-record deal with EMI? Would they have grabbed as many headlines and, depending on who you ask, profited as grandly as they did through their direct-to-consumer sales model? More importantly, would artists big and small be as in control of their own destinies, with labels now giving away royalties and masters ownership in deals with viral acts, had Radiohead not proven it was possible on such a massive scale?

Of course, hindsight is perfect. But it’s hard to imagine a present that resembles the one we’re living in as music fans without the band’s ability to look to the future.

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Where does In Rainbows rank on your list of the best Radiohead albums? Is it their peak? Sound off in the comments.