Radiohead Fans vs. Black-Market Sellers: The Battle to Leak the OK Computer Tapes

The vast archives of a classic album are stolen, traded, and price-marked at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then the fans step in.
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Photo by Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

On Tuesday morning, Radiohead released around 16 hours of OK Computer outtakes on Bandcamp, with the proceeds going to fight the climate crisis. This might have seemed strange to those not obsessively following the group, but Radiohead’s hand was essentially forced: The archival material—which includes long-sought alternate versions of “Lift” and “True Love Waits,” solo demos, and other sonic experiments—leaked online last week. How did this treasure trove of music, made more than 20 years ago by one of the most critically acclaimed bands of all time, find its way to the internet now? It involves a black-market rap leaker being outmaneuvered by one of the internet’s most active musical fanbases.

It all began a few weeks ago, on May 26, when a user called Zimbra joined a Radiohead-oriented group on the chat app Discord, known as W.A.S.T.E. Central (yes, just like Radiohead’s official social network). Though this person’s entire presence in the Discord group has since been deleted, the initial responses to their comments make clear that Zimbra had access to and was teasing unreleased material from OK Computer. When the album was given a 20th-anniversary reissue in 2017 (subtitled OKNOTOK 1997 2017), the box set included an exclusive cassette of demos and outtakes. Zimbra, whose handle echoes a classic Talking Heads song, seemed to have more where those came from.

A little more than a week later, on June 3, a post on Reddit’s Radiohead channel sounded the alarm: A well-known leaker claimed to have 18 hours of tracks made by Thom Yorke during the recording of OK Computer. Though the post didn’t mention Zimbra by name, the leaker had shared previews of the kinds of material first teased by Zimbra, reportedly asking $150,000 for the full stash, or $800 per studio track and $50 per live track. A dubiously sourced archive documenting the making of a momentous album—a fan’s holy grail, an artist’s private rough drafts, and a copyright lawyer’s worst nightmare—was effectively being held for “ransom,” as Jonny Greenwood later put it.

On June 4, a user named Hoserama joined the Radiohead Discord chat. While Hoserama is the handle of a concert taper and trader who’s well known in online Radiohead circles, evidence later emerged that this user was not the longstanding Hoserama, but rather Zimbra pretending to be Hoserama. (“What if I make a Discord with that username. And then leak the entire thing as him?” a screenshot of an apparent chat log with Zimbra reads.) “Told you I’d be back,” this fake Hoserama posted last week, along with a link to a site hosting a 1.38-gigabyte cache of the outtakes in question—more than 17 hours’ worth. “More soon,” he promised, before quitting the group.

The leak spread quickly. Amid much hand-wringing over hearing tracks that were never intended for public consumption, the Radiohead fan community began compiling a Google doc that outlines the contents of these 18 lengthy audio files. John Nicholas, the Google doc’s owner, is candid with me about the moral quandary of a leak that is not sanctioned by the artist. “In the situation we were placed in, it seemed that we were approaching something on the level of the Let It Be tapes or perhaps even The Basement Tapes, considering how many unreleased Thom solo demos were in this particular set,” he writes via email. “It made more sense to convince the leaker to share something of that magnitude without making a profit off the band’s work, which would have been the outcome had we not gone public with the leaker’s info.” The fans’ Reddit post, in other words, forced the leaker’s hand.

Zimbra, who is prominent on the rap-leak forum Leakth.is, claims to have acquired the OK Computer sessions through the Leakth.is Discord group. “I advertised I had some unreleased Beatles,” Zimbra tells me via Discord direct message. “So I get a DM from a Hoserama account saying he has 18 hours of unreleased Radiohead… Google the username and of course I find the whole thing about him and concerts and so on. I figure well, this guy seems legit, he has snippets and everything which verify it’s really unreleased. I trade him after an hour of banter trying to learn how he got it.”

Back on Leakth.is, Zimbra apparently offered one of the newly obtained versions of “Lift” for $500. “Considering that Kanye mumbling for 2 minutes sells for about $2K, I think that’s a pretty good deal right?” Zimbra tells me. “Turns out it’s not.” Direct messages start arriving consisting of “people just massively hating on me, some asking how much for all 18 hours… I toss the $150K figure to someone as a hypothetical because at some point you can just do the math... Then the Reddit post drops and at this point everyone kinda freaks out. I do, the now-known-false Hoserama account does, Reddit does too. And it leaks.”

The actual Hoserama, whom I reach through several online accounts, denies taking part in the leak. “I’m not the guy who released the OK Computer sessions,” Hoserama says through the Radiohead Discord group, which he only joined after hearing about the drama. “It’s some guy, no idea who, who basically took my name.” Later over email Hoserama reiterates, “I had nothing to do with the Radiohead sessions.”

John Nicholas, the Google doc guy, says the Reddit post helped shame Zimbra into posing as the more established Radiohead bootlegger and leaking the same files they had been trying to sell, just hours before. “I don’t get the sense that Zimbra is the actual thief, but none of his stories about how he obtained the files really add up either,” Nicholas writes. “In the end, he was so spooked by the chance of being outed beyond the private, Martin Shkreli-like trading circles that he briefly impersonated Hoserama.”

For their part, Zimbra declines to comment on the record about who posted the leak. When it comes to Radiohead’s official release of it, Zimbra seems ambivalent. “Their response is for sure a very Radiohead-ish response,” Zimbra tells me via a secure email account. “Even my anxiety is giving me a confused look trying to figure out if this is good or bad. Sucks the whole $150k thing and ‘ransom’ was taken way out of context to the point of the band saying it, but oh well.”

Nicholas, from the Google doc, actually concurs on this point. “Apparently the band is under the impression that they were being extorted by the original leaker,” he writes. “I don’t think that was Zimbra’s intent. While we’re not a fan of what Zimbra was trying to do, at all, he never told us anything to suggest he was trying to get money from the band, only from fans.”

For now, who might have traded the OK Computer leak to Zimbra in the first place remains a mystery. “I’m pretty much as in the dark as you,” Zimbra writes to me. “The fake Hoserama is who I got it from initially. I tried to contact them afterwards… even tried to figure out myself who it was. But stuff like this happens. People will make alternate accounts to sell one specific thing if it’s too risky. I’d say that’s the case here.”

Unsurprisingly, Nicholas has a theory about this as well. “The situation that makes the most sense to me is that these minidiscs were digitized by a third party so the band could choose material from them for the OKNOTOK box set, and that someone involved at the third party stole the files and traded them,” he says, but notes that Zimbra also mentioned having other Radiohead music that was not part of the leak. “It’s possible that there was a larger theft at work here.”

This time, hyper-vigilant fans—and Radiohead themselves—appear to have made the best of a strange situation, transforming a leaker’s personal profit motive into charitable support for Extinction Rebellion: an environmental activist group that wants to save the physical world.