Radiohead In Non-Shocking Number One Album Entry

In the depths of the countryside, five men collectively known as Radiohead locked themselves away in a big empty house to make their new album In Rainbows.

People everywhere had high expectations for this one so savvy people like us could call it 'the return to OK Computer days' album. Finally in October, an announcement was made that a new album had been created with an immediate release a few days later. Not only would this mean that the traditional three month wait between news of a new album and release would be quashed, but the geeks on the internet wouldn’t have to brave the outside when the big day finally came. And on Monday everyone else got to buy it on CD. 

And, according to plan, In Rainbows has shot to number one.

When In Rainbows came out on the internet, fans had the choice to pay £40 for luxury artwork, vinyl and CD versions of the album and an exclusive CD of extra material. But not everyone is a mega-fan and the average person doesn't have that amount of money to spend on something that will sit on a shelf collecting dust and looking pretty. Unless you’re the sort of fan to make it in to some sort of Radiohead gangster chain and parade down the local indie disco. 

But since last Monday, people have been able to go to the shops and buy a physical, normal-priced copy of In Rainbows for themselves. And they did - enough of them for In Rainbows to knock Leona Lewis off the top of the album charts. Even though we could release a CD of a monkey belching the alphabet in the first week of January and it'd get to number one in the album charts, for the Leona thing we thank Radiohead a lot and offer them an open invite to come round to our gaff for endless cups of tea, coconut cake and those chocolate digestive biscuits with caramel in them. 

So it looks like Radiohead's 'pay what you like and then pay what we ask you to like everyone else' tactic has worked on all fronts. But who are the big losers in all of this? Old record label EMI upset lead singer/writer/depressed man Thom Yorke when it released a statement saying that the band wanted silly amounts of money for a new contract. A reply written like one of our many abusive comments was posted back by Yorke on the band's blog saying it was a load of porkie pies and they wanted to so something different or whatnot. 

The floodgates haven’t quite opened for more people to release music like Radiohead, but we expect the next industry-defining moment to be from Razorlight. Soon they will actually be posting a CD to everyone in the UK with a personalised apology for what they have done to our ears and a grovelling admission of guilt about how they’ll try to give us our time back for the amount lost listening to their bilge.  

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Radiohead CD Tops UK Album Chart - BBC