More important, from a music fan’s perspective at least, are the questions these seemingly communal events raise about listening in our current era, even versus a few years ago. Are we able to focus our scattered attention more, the way people supposedly did before they could hop from song to song, artist to artist, in the click of a button? Could tune-in releases help point toward a listening future where the calculated strategy surrounding album rollouts can—gasp!—again take a back seat to the music itself? Or are these listening events, like many facets of our current media environment, just another way to capitalize on the power of social-media trending? (Oh the irony of Radiohead trending, given Radiohead’s own deletion of their social media accounts.)

The answer may be some combination of the three. For BBC Radio 6’s Tom Robinson, who presented the A Moon Shaped Pool listening party, the sheer logistics necessitated a different type of listening. “We couldn’t even listen to the whole album before we started broadcasting,” he tells me. “We had a team of people listening through to make sure that the language was OK for the BBC to broadcast.” He adds, with a chuckle, “We didn’t even hear the title of the damn album until five minutes before we went live.”

The high-profile occasion meant he didn’t talk over the ends of songs, as radio DJs are trained to do, and he describes the whole studio relaxing as each track passed—and, to their delight, didn’t disappoint. “The biggest relief was that it was good,” Robinson says. In particular, he remembers playing “Glass Eyes,” shortly before the show’s half-hour mark. “That just made me in tears in the studio as it was coming up," he adds. "I had to compose myself to announce into the news.”

Nor is Robinson a stranger to listener interaction. His Sunday night show, “The BBC Introducing Mixtape,” is largely unscripted and driven by audience recommendations. Still, a new Radiohead album is a different matter, and during the broadcast he read enraptured tweets from listeners worldwide about the beauty of sharing this moment in real time with the world. “How wonderful,” he says, “that there were people tweeting us from Russia, from Italy, from South America who were sharing the experience, heaving this stuff at the same time that we were.”

The timing of the calls to tune in to these new albums, usually just a couple of days in advance, seems to reflect the social web’s current pace. A new Pew Research study finds that when it comes to articles, at least, mobile users tend to engage only in the first few days after publication. To some, sadly, albums are just another form of content, something to be consumed while it’s top of mind, forgotten once it’s not. This is the larger media environment that artists must consider if they want to reach the masses. Radiohead, Beyoncé, and Drake can turn their albums into events because they’re already big enough that the BBC, HBO, and Apple want to work with them. Other artists may find it’s more important to have their music be available wherever and whenever potential fans might want to hear it.

“People have this power,” Yorke sings, in a very different context, on A Moon Shaped Pool. As digital services continue to evolve, that power is what the broader music community is still trying to figure out how to harness.