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Tuesday, Radiohead Guitarist and songwriter Jonny Greenwood made an announcement on Twitter and Facebook: the band had been "hacked" and the author had attempted a $ 150,000 shakedown to prevent the publication of the files. In response? Radiohead has thrown everything online for free. You can watch it continuously for 18 days or buy it on Bandcamp for around $ 23. All proceeds will go to a climate protest organization called Extinction Rebellion.
Based solely on Greenwood's statement, it is unclear exactly what happened. "We got hacked last week – someone stole Thom's minidisk [sic] archive from the moment of Ok computer, and would have claimed $ 150,000 on the threat of publishing it. "Thom is Thom Yorke, the band's singer. Ok computer is the group's flagship album of 1997. And the mini discs were Sony's proprietary digital storage format; as you will probably guess, these are smaller CDs.
This should do for references and terminology. But the chronology also deserves more clarity. While Greenwood is calling hackers, it seems more likely that someone has accessed the physical disks in question. And while Radiohead says it publishes 18 hours of live demos and recordings of the Ok computer days as an inch in the eyes of the reported ransom, in truth, all these tracks have already circulated freely online for six days, as previously reported the music and culture site NME. In other words, the ransom was already a moot point.
To find out exactly what happened – which bootlegger took what and traded with whom, and then published it -, you have to get enough Reddit bunny holes to create a real maze. Anyway, the 18 tracks have been online long enough for fans to have even created a Google Doc that breaks down each title into songs of its component for easy navigation.
Nevertheless, it is impressive to see Radiohead publish so much to annoy a budding pirate. This is not the first time that something like this is happening; the hackers tried to shake Netflix after the unpublished Orange is the new black episodes, and Quentin Tarantino threatened to bail out Hateful Eight after a leak in the PDF file before shooting begins. In these cases too, no money was paid and both projects proceeded as originally planned.
But releasing the Ok computer The bands feel distinct, in that the group, according to Greenwood, never designed the content for public consumption. Rather than going forward with an existing plan, he had to formulate a new one. If anything, one wonders what the plaintiff was thinking of the original ransom; it's the same group, after all, who published In Rainbows for free – and always cumulated better sales than all its previous digital versions combined. If anyone understands the dynamics of content, money and the internet, that is Radiohead.
Like with In Rainbows, the choice to pay depends on you; you can either go directly to Bandcamp or a Buy Now button in the player below. Frankly, looking behind the curtain of one of the generation's most innovative albums seems priceless. "It's only interesting," writes Greenwood, "and very, very long, it's not a phone download … Rainy out, is not it?"
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