Radiohead: In Rainbows
XX million albums... through a traffic jam.
CD Packaging
No doubt you know the story of Radiohead’s In Rainbows – how the band released the album online, and let buyers pay whatever they wanted. Record company bigwigs probably still wake up in cold sweats thinking about it.
Well, that’s only part of the story. After the online launch, Radiohead signed to XL Recordings, taking them out of the great machine that is EMI.
At ThinkTank, we were commissioned to produce the CD version of the album, and its packaging. Without EMI’s vast network to fall back on, it was up to us to make sure it hit the stores on time.
Radiohead Cover
The pack was pretty unique: there was no jewel case, but the CD came with a set of stickers so you could reuse one of those old cases we all have lying around. The timing was not so neat: a global release on New Year’s Eve. This is an industry no-no: the season’s swamped with Christmas releases, and no one ships globally. Except us.
Getting the CDs made, producing the packaging, and fulfilling all the orders meant working like Trojans, and being fanatical about deadlines. We ended up hand-packing 50,000 units a day, on 24 hour shifts. (We got some help in for that bit.) Then, just as we thought we were home and dry, there was a transport strike in Italy.
Not usually a problem in south London, of course. But it is when every element of your urgent CD release is being made (you guessed it) in Italy. Think The Italian Job, but nationwide. No food getting to the supermarkets, no petrol getting to the pumps. 22,000 Fiat workers sent home. And one urgent Radiohead CD stuck in the middle. Nightmare.
We got on the phones, called in favours, pulled strings and drank quite a lot of coffee. Finally, we managed to organise a smaller fleet of vehicles to get this wonderful record out of Italy and distributed across the world.
It’s possible we celebrated a little more than usual that New Year’s Eve. But we reckoned we’d earned it.