Anti Marketing: Kid A

Kid A was an anti-exclusive experiment that showed a major music media was no more privileged than an obscure blogger when it came to showcasing love for music.

Radiohead’s decision to opt for minimal marketing for Kid A left EMI (record label) executives jaw dropped. The band quashed any bells-and-whistles promotion plans for the highly-anticipated record by deciding to release not one single from it. If that wasn’t enough, there would be no videos either.

The decision was referred to by some industry insiders as ‘commercial suicide’. However, the band felt it was the only way to avoid the life-draining press and concert tours of OK Computer unfolding again. The band’s front man Thom Yorke told the New York Times magazine: “Those last months on the ‘OK Computer’ tour, it was just totally wrong.”

This sentiment led to them playing just two US dates to promote Kid A — one of which was on Saturday Night Live in October 2000 where the band performed two new songs Idioteque and The National Anthem. The performance shocked viewers expecting rock songs, but instead Jonny Greenwood played electronic instruments and the house brass band improvised over jazzy The National Anthem, while Thom Yorke danced erratically to the electronic-experimental piece Idioteque. The band did tour the UK and Europe. However, this was in an intimate capacity tent in which corporate logos and commercial sponsors were banned.

Despite garnering many column inches from the revolutionary methodology, journalists too were hit by Kid A’s unorthodox minimal marketing — having to conduct their interviews with the band via email instead of the traditional in-person talks. Mojo writer Jim Irvin said of the album’s press playback: “We sat on cushions in an empty warehouse in Camden listening to it on wireless headphones… people were mouthing, ‘this is bollocks’ — and that may have been as much to do with the event as the record.” Contrary to the usual industry norm, no early copy of the album was distributed for the press to review.

With no radio play and the press disgruntled, it seemed the Radiohead’s idealism could leave them out of pocket. Gennaro Castaldo of HMV said: “From a consumer retail perspective such an approach might have meant the commercial potential of the album wouldn’t be fully realised.” However, on closer examination, there was commercial savvy bubbling under the mainstream surface. In place of traditional early press copy distribution and promotional music videos, the band released the entire album online, three weeks prior to its official release date, along with a series of short and mysterious video clips called blips, in an embeddable multimedia player called iBlip.

iBlip

iBlip was a Java-based app that could be embedded on websites including fan sites. It allowed users to stream the album, and included artwork, photos, live tracks, and links to order Kid A on Amazon. Then the stream was made available to anyone who wanted to post the app. The blips itself, directed by the band’s longtime art collaborator Stanley Downood, came about in response to the band’s hatred for TV adverts. Not long after the release of its iBlip, Kid A was leaked online and shared on the peer-to-peer service Napster. But Thom Yorke simply said that Napster “encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do.”

In an era when dialup internet connections was still common, and a full five years before YouTube even existed, iBlip generated a massive amount of attention. Kid A was streamed 400,000 times via 1,000 iBlip app shared across fan sites and other websites, an unheard-of total that did little to dampen the album’s first week sales — it debuted at #1 in both the UK and the US, at the peak of of teen pop and hip-hop rock popularity.

Speaking at Radiohead’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, David Byrne of Talking Heads, one of Radiohead’s formative influences, said: “What was really weird and very encouraging was that [Kid A] was popular. It was a hit! It proved to me that the artistic risk paid off and music fans sometimes are not stupid.”

Kid A was an anti-exclusive experiment that showed a major music media was no more privileged than an obscure blogger when it came to showcasing love for music. It put music right on the hands of those who appreciate it: the fans.

Radiohead pushed album release marketing to further limits through pay-what-you-want direct purchase method for In Rainbows (2007), and “erasing” their internet presence for A Moon Shaped Pool (2016).