It was stitched together on old Sony cams and video editors from eBay.

While we were in our studio, making the last few records, we would schedule last-minute “web casts”, and, at short notice, make small, spontaneous and impromptu programmes where we would play our favourite records, talk to fans, play new and old songs live, and even cover versions of songs from bands that had inspired us. The internet makes it easier for everything to be live, and that’s what we do. The other attraction for us was the conjuring up of an event, a way of marking our releases and performances as special, unique times. Why go exclusively through such straitened formats when you could broadcast directly to people who are interested in you, in that moment? Radio has such regulated playlists that disc jockeys are lucky to have one free play per show. Music on television is scarce, and hard to do well. This desire to use the technology was driven by distrust and frustration with trying to broadcast our music via traditional media, such as radio and television. This coincided with the growth of the internet as a medium to discover and share music, something we had used to reach fans while we made In Rainbows. We owned it outright, and could do whatever we wanted with it. This time there was no EMI, and no one to decide anything but ourselves. Previously, we would have given it to our record company at least three months up front, and then gone through the protracted round of meetings to decide on videos and singles - experiences we’d had for the previous six records. In August 2007, we had finished our first record after the end of our deal with EMI. So it seemed a good moment to take stock of the technological and cultural changes that have happened in the meantime. Last summer, as we finished some more recordings, we started to think and talk about how to release them. The idea came from a friend of our manager, who proposed an “honesty box”, placing the onus on people to ask themselves how much they valued our music. I remember the excitement of it all, not least because the release date was my wife’s birthday, 10 October. It’s been nearly three years since we announced our “pay what you think it’s worth” scheme for the launch of our last record In Rainbows.

Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood explains why the band released their last album direct to their fans

Radiohead rarity list