Did Radiohead sign with Google?
Well, no. But with the music business in a much-publicized tailspin, and online operators like Apple taking over the MP3 distro biz, you’d be forgiven for thinking that an eat-your-lunch behemoth like Google would get into the label game. Especially after seeing the search giant’s new site for Radiohead’s latest single, House of Cards. And especially considering Radiohead’s idiosyncratic, post-EMI distribution strategy: a pay-as-you-like digital release of In Rainbows, a New Year’s Eve webcast of same and a contest for fans to create the next video.
For better or worse, the Google promo boost doesn’t mean Google’s repping the critically-acclaimed English rockers. But it did take an intense interest in the video for House of Cards, a haunting, FX-laden vid created using 3-D scanning technology — the same technology used by Google for its Street View project.
On the Google blog, a project manager explains the technology that piqued their interest:
In this new video, there were no cameras on set. Instead, two scanning technologies were used to capture 3D images. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produced structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne LIDAR system that uses multiple lasers was used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In the video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.
Google didn’t finance the video itself. Rather, Google partnered with Radiohead to host the video on a custom site, and distribute a making-of video, an interactive 3D data manipulation tool, and a download of the data visualization which allows DIYers to experiment at home.
The video itself is an eerily compelling depiction of frontman Thom Yorke and several city locations (a nondescript Florida suburb, a bridge) as swirls of pixel data, coalescing and disintegrating in time with the music. The effect’s somewhere between an electronic interpretation of the 3-D pin impression toys popular in the ’80s and the poster for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. But, y’know, arty.
Perhaps more interesting than the actual aesthetics of the video is how Radiohead, post-EMI, is approaching distribution from every angle. Both the pay-as-you-will release of In Rainbows and the fan-created video contest are attempts to harness the crowdsourcing ethos. The House of Cards video, on the other hand, is a high-tech effort promoted by a corporate giant (albeit one with an interest in crowd-sourced data).
Radiohead’s tremendous success allows it more leeway than the average band. But its multipronged distribution strategy can still be a powerful lesson: Experiment.
