Close-Up: Live issue - Why Radiohead is in tune with online marketing.

What can other brands learn from Radiohead's innovative digital marketing techniques? Kate Nettleton investigates.

Even though the music file sharing service Napster was taken to the US courts eight years ago and forced to go legit, the illegal download community is still being presented as the final nail in the coffin for the music industry.

But rather than kowtowing to these apocalyptic forecasts, some bands, such as Radiohead, have embraced the shift towards online downloadable material by using the appropriation and manipulation of their own music as a marketing technique.

After their contract with EMI came to a close in 2004, Radiohead, believing the relationship to be a 'decaying business model', decided not to renew the agreement and go it alone.

Although the band had already established a regularly updated personalised blog and MySpace page, by owning all the rights to their music they had the autonomy to instigate their first high-profile online marketing stunt by releasing their new album In Rainbows online and, amazingly, allowing customers to name their own price.

By forcing consumers to make a conscious decision about the value of music, the band generated a plethora of word-of-mouth marketing and created an image that Radiohead was not interested in making money but in the music itself - something many bands strive for, but rarely achieve.

With the middleman successfully cut out, Radiohead launched a series of user-generated content initiatives to build on their intimate relationship with the consumer, beginning with a tie-up with iTunes to release segmented portions of tracks for fans to create remixes.