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And Finally Artist News Digital
Radiohead relaunch website as library
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 21 January 2020
Radiohead have revamped their website. And yes, on a quiet news day in late January, that counts as a news story. I mean, it’s quite a big revamp.
“Radiohead.com has always been infuriatingly uninformative and unpredictable”, said the band on Twitter. “We have now, predictably, made it incredibly informative”.
Meanwhile, a more lengthy press statement muses that “the internet as a whole has never been a reliable resource for detailed or even accurate information re: Radiohead. Many sites that attempted to provide some measure of service have long since gone dark as well. The overall effect has been ‘Radiohead’ search results that yield random and/or abbreviated shards: songs and album titles unaccompanied by detailed artwork or any additional context, low quality videos preceded by advertisements and shuffled via algorithms, and so on”.
But no more, thanks to the launch of the Radiohead Public Library. “What the fuck’s that?”, you ask. Well, visitors to the band’s website will now “be able to create their own library card and membership number, and access a highly curated and organised archive of the band’s catalogue and corresponding visuals and various artefacts associated with each album”.
That includes “detailed artwork, official videos, and ad-free HD live and TV performances, b-sides and compilation tracks, previously out-of-print merchandise to be custom made on demand, band members’ ‘office chart’ playlists from around the time of ‘In Rainbows’, ‘The King Of Limbs’ and ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ recording sessions, and more”.
So, basically, no end of fine “content” organised and presented in a loving way. Are you excited? The band are. So much so they are each taking it in turn this week to be chief librarian curating and sharing stuff from across the website. And they’ve even plonked some rarity tracks onto the streaming services. Good times all round!
