Thom Yorke recently had 18 hours of demo material from Radiohead’s OK Computer sessions hacked and the band were being blackmailed for their return. Except they decided to turn the tables on the blackmailer, release them instead on Bandcamp for £18 and give all the proceeds to Extinction Rebellion.
The marketing for Yorke’s new solo album, Anima, is not quite as dramatic as this – but that does not make it any less interesting. He might have described Spotify as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse” back in 2013, having pulled the band’s music from the DSP (it returned in 2016), but he has less of a beef with Netflix where a film tied to the album will be, for now at least, exclusive there.
Described as a “one-reeler” film and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it is based around three tracks from the album and will be available on Netflix from 27th June. It will also be screened in select IMAX cinemas on the day before for those without a Netflix account.
Netflix has been backing a lot of original music programming of late – including The Dirt (the Mötley Crüe biopic), Rolling Thunder Revue (the Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan’s 1975 tour), its ReMastered series (including documentaries on Sam Cooke, Robert Johnson, Bob Marley, Johnny Cash and the Miami Showband), Beyoncé’s Homecoming and Taylor Swift’s Reputation.
Acts and labels have, for the most part, given up the idea of handing DSPs exclusives on albums – but video content is still fair game. A few years ago, this would have been the kind of thing that Apple or YouTube would have had first dibs on, but Netflix and Amazon Prime are very much joining this video arms race.
While money and promotional commitments will be important factors in determining which services land these types of exclusive, there is arguably a level of gravitas that comes with being on Netflix (where the artist involved feels their video fits into the Netflix world) that perhaps gives it an advantage over a YouTube or an Apple Music. Yorke was lambasted as a Luddite for his attacks on Spotify but this deal shows he is a shrewder streaming operator than some had presumed.
