Radiohead (or Radiohead Box Set online) is a collection of six studio albums and one live album recorded by Radiohead, reissued as a box set on the 10th December 2007. The box set is available as a seven CD box set, a digital download and a 4GB USB Stick. The box set peaked at #95 in Canada's album charts.
Background[]
The band's contract with Parlophone lapsed in 2004 after the release of their sixth studio album Hail To the Thief in 2003. Without a record contract the band recorded the album In Rainbows which was released independently in October 2007 as a digital download for which the customer was able to name their own price and as a "discbox" which included the In Rainbows CD, a bonus CD from the recording sessions, a vinyl edition of In Rainbows contained in two 45 rpm vinyl records, and a hardcover book. This discbox was available for purchase from the "In Rainbows" website for £40 (US$82), and was shipped to customers in early December 2007.
On 31 October 2007 Radiohead announced that they were signing a new deal with XL Recordings and that In Rainbows would be released commercially as a CD release. Very soon after, Parlophone announced the release of the box set. It was released exactly one week after the discbox was due to ship and the physical version retailed for about the same price as the discbox. Radiohead were not involved in the decision to release the box set and did not promote it. It has been suggested that the release of the box set is an act of retribution for losing the rights to selling the commercially lucrative Radiohead albums. Parlophone have denied this and Radiohead have refused to comment on the release Early in November 2007, search results for the term Radiohead prominently displayed a sponsored link reading "Radiohead - New Album 'In Rainbows' now available as boxset". The advert, however, led not to the In Rainbows website, but to the website where Parlophone was selling the box set of the six previously released albums. Parlophone soon corrected this error and Radiohead accepted it as a genuine mistake rather than an attempt to deceive.
Content[]
The box set contains their first six albums and one live E.P. recorded by Radiohead for their former label EMI between 1993 and 2003:
- Pablo Honey
- The Bends
- OK Computer
- Kid A
- Amnesiac
- I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings
- Hail To the Thief
The box set was released in physical form as a limited edition seven CD box set, with each album in original digipak sleeves, as a digital download as DRM-free 320 kbit/s MP3 files with digital artwork and as a 4GB USB Stick. The USB stick contains all seven albums as WAV audio files and digital artwork for each album. There have also been reports of certain stores across Australia and the United Kingdom stocking boxsets that include special editions of the first three albums, as well as Amnesiac.