In 2007, the idea of collective excitement surrounding an album became more of an unattainable ideal, thanks to a constant churn of music, increased fragmentation of the pop ideal, and listeners further burrowing into their own genre-specific niches with the aid of the Internet. (And even within the more Net-savvy niches, the idea of an album leaking on a specific date became more of an abstract idea, what with the demise of OiNK and the scurrying of that site's users to a variety of replacements.) But one band actually managed to bring together a relatively wide swath of music fans, and it was the result of a late-night blog post at the end of September. You're currently reading this on a computer, so you probably know who I'm talking about.

Radiohead's strategy for releasing In Rainbows had innovative points and a big name behind it, both of which kept every move the band made in the news: the announcement that it would be out 10 days hence; the "pay what you will" ideal, which inspired a handful of people to drop $200 on what would turn out to be a bunch of low-fidelity digital files; the idea of the democratized leak, in which anyone with a computer, from press to the casual user who just happened upon radiohead.com on Oct. 4, would be forced to hear the album at the same time; the subsequent sorta-backpedaling announcements that the MP3 files would be low-quality and that all of this was really just a marketing run-up for the CD's release; the Webcasts; the intimations that Radiohead still made a still-undisclosed pile of money way before In Rainbows arrived at the country's few remaining FYEs.

In Rainbows was such a music/press sensation that Radiohead's experiment even coined the dual phrases "the Radiohead model" and "pulling a Radiohead," although the definitions of both were vague. Did they mean the "pay what you want" tip-jar idea? Breaking free from the major-label complex? Digitally releasing an album before its physical street date, so as to prevent leaks? (And wasn't that really the Stars model?) Or did they mean treating the whole world as press, and handing out "advances" to anyone willing to fork over an e-mail address? It wasn't really clear.

But that confusion—and the attendant conversations about the worth of music, the idea of the post-label world, and what constituted a "pop" "success"—was an essential part of what made Radiohead any music-related Internet entity's obvious consensus pick^* for artist of the year. Let's face it: In the blog-reading, OiNK-mourning Internet music world, Thom Yorke and his pals are quite possibly the last superstars standing, appealing to a wide cross-section of music lovers thanks, in no small part, to the machinations of the formerly powerful major-label apparatus that is currently being spurned by any star wishing to curry favor with the Digg crowd.

And really, that fact may make the discussion of the Radiohead model's future a moot point. After all, is there any other band out there whose mention of tour cities—and not dates—will make people so excited, any Google News-indexed sites listing them will watch their traffic spike in ways that are only rivaled by those following even passing mentions of nu-heartthrob Zac Efron? Perhaps we'll see when Nine Inch Nails releases its next album.

Speaking of Efron, one could draw parallels between the successes of In Rainbows and that of the music churned out by the Disneyplex, specifically High School Musical 2; in both cases, you had a controlled release of music and publicity about a release to a very targeted demographic. The only difference is really the constraints; while the run-up to In Rainbows' first release was a mere 10 days, anticipation for HSM2 built for months, with a song even leaking three months before its attendant movie's premiere, but that excitement was for the most part contained within the vertically integrated Disney Channel/Radio Disney tweenplex. Both models work, too, despite their artists being somewhat provincially popular; the emphasis tracks from In Rainbows haven't really hit at rock radio yet, while the efforts of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers to break onto playlists that aren't Disney-programmed have been mixed at best. But perhaps that provincialism is essential to fans' excitement; letting other people in might make the music less special, especially if it turns out that those newer converts don't really care one way or the other. (Witness the domino-like failures of American Idol, which had the two strikes of appealing to the most mass audience and seeming inescapability, this year.)

Perhaps the term "Radiohead model" should, then, be defined as such: "masterminding a highly concentrated, mini-event-filled run-up to an album release, one that turns said release into the topic of conversation among a finite number of people, thus becoming its own perpetual press-making machine and keeping up peoples' awareness levels." We'll probably be subjected to other experiments along these lines over the course of the year; the problem, of course, will come when we start drowning in them, because the singularity of that late-September announcement was the most important key to the "Radiohead model"'s attendant success.

Maura Johnston is the editor of Idolator.

^* I actually put Britney Spears at No. 1; to me, she represented the fucked-up, gutter-trawling, music-related-celebrity ideal that was the outside-the-bubble perception of pop music in 2007. Also, Blackout? Not that bad!