Radiohead's Digital Album Sales, Visualized

Nick DeSantis
Nick DeSantis
Forbes Staff
I tell stories through data visualization, infographics and design.
Photo: Getty Images. Design: Nick DeSantis, Forbes staff
Unconventional album drops, reliant on a single, towering spike of enthusiasm in the moment rather than weeks of expensive pre-release buzz-building, are swiftly becoming the new normal in the music industry. Over just the past few weeks, popular A-list artists like Beyonce and Drake, fringe cult acts like the cacophonous hip-hop duo Death Grips, and even comedians like Louis CK have harnessed the element of surprise to birth their latest releases.
Following a mysterious scrubbing of all of their social media accounts, art rock band Radiohead's latest studio album, A Moon Shaped Pool, materialized on their website and select streaming surfaces this past Sunday after only two days' notice.  But the sudden release isn't the band's first foray into unexpected marketing. One could argue that Radiohead helped forged the template for unconventional album releases in the Internet age.
From Kid A's short video "blips" and popularity on Napster in 2000 to In Rainbows' infamous and influential "pay-what-you-want" tip jar strategy in 2007, Radiohead saw the value in harnessing the internet for generating chatter among fans long before many other popular artists. But, just how many digital album sales has online buzz and worldwide popularity generated for the venerated band?
Design: Nick DeSantis, Forbes staff
Through numbers provided by  Nielsen Soundscan, FORBES visualized Radiohead's digital album sales via two metrics: digital album sales, as well as digital album sales plus track equivalent downloads (where the download of 10 tracks from an album are counted as one sale of that album). With track equivalent downloads included, Radiohead has sold 12.3 million digital albums and 756,000 digital singles to date.
Comparing digital album sales to digital album sales plus track equivalent downloads, it's immediately apparent that Radiohead's earlier albums, particularly their rock-leaning 1993 debut Pablo Honey and their breakthrough album and best-selling release, 1997's OK Computer, present the widest disparity between the two metrics, with a difference of 200,000 and 900,ooo respectively. Although Nielsen couldn't provide FORBES with numbers for specific Radiohead singles, both of those albums contain some of Radiohead's most popular singles among fans, including the dynamic rocker Creep off of their debut album and the droll, sarcastic Karma Police and Paranoid Android. It's possible that sales of singles like these could possibly account for their wider difference in numbers.
Radiohead's earliest album releases, particularly those from the '90s, could be viewed as more singles-based collections rather than the more cohesive albums they would later release in the 2000s and onward. With the release of 2000's Kid A, Radiohead took a deeper dive into a more experimental electronic sound influenced by Aphex Twin, Can, and other musical mavericks that only previously tinged their rock-based output in earlier albums. That musical change also transformed Radiohead into more of an album-based band, rather than one that was more singles-driven. That shift could help explain the narrowing gaps between the two metrics seen in Radiohead's later albums. In the post-Kid A era, In Rainbows presents the widest gap, with a 80,000 unit sales difference.
Despite their widely-acclaimed marketing strategies for their later albums, their digital album sales still fall short of their first three releases, with only Kid A, with 1.5 million digital album sales plus track equivalent downloads, coming close to the 1.6 million in sales shown by the band's 1995 sophomore effort, The Bends. 
Nick DeSantis
Nick DeSantis
Forbes Staff
I am Forbes’ Editorial Graphics Producer. I have contributed editorial and designed infographics and data visualizations for MTV News,,, The Post and Courier and more.