Last month, Radiohead was at it again, announcing a pitch competition for animated videos to accompany the songs on the album.

Now comes news that Thom Yorke et al. have made available several "stems," or chunks of track, from their newly released single, "Nude." Fans can purchase the stems on iTunes, remix them through Apple's GarageBand program, and upload the finished produced to a devoted website, radioheadremix.com. Fans will select the best remix to win an as-yet-undisclosed prize.

Radiohead's various outreach efforts present an interesting example of the new media literacy concept of transmedia navigation in action. Typically, we think about transmedia navigation as an important skill for following complex storylines--think, for example, of the work to extend the NBC show "Heroes" far beyond the TV screen into multiple media, including novels, comic books, and a website that features fan art, backstories, and character blogs. Fans can visit the website, searching for clues, or buy the various supplementary novels and other materials--and they will be rewarded with a richer, fuller understanding of the show itself. (Producers of the show came to MIT in November to discuss the transmedia aspect of "Heroes"; you can download the podcast of this event here.)

Radiohead, it could be argued, is also trying to tell a "story"--though not a narrative in the traditional sense. In this case, the story seems to be more of a flow of information dictating the band's cultural role and relevance. As fans make decisions about how and whether to engage in these new offerings, they are not only engaging in a conversation that's unfolding across multiple media platforms, but they're simultaneously being asked to follow that conversation, much as in previous decades devotees kept up with the actions of their favorite musicians through fan magazines, tabloids, or, later, fansites. When In Rainbows was released for download, fans were faced with a series of decisions: To download or not to download, and if download, then how much to pay? The money and words that were exchanged as part of this decision-making process initiated an ongoing conversation about the wisdom and cultural significance of such a move. The same may be true about the animation and remix competitions. Fans are asked to both participate in the "packaging" of Radiohead's creative output and to engage in a conversation, either through this effort or through the discussion surrounding it, about what this participation means to the cultural legacy of the group.

In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins writes that transmedia storytelling works best when each medium is used to tell the part of the story that it's most suited for and that each piece of this story "needs to be self-contained so you don't need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa." This experiment by Radiohead is, I think, an effort to create a transmedia model that can sustain multiple pathways and audience needs. A fan does not, for example, need to have heard the band's current single in order to remix its stems (though I'd imagine it helps). Likewise, you don't need to know about Radiohead's history of offering up jarring, freakishly depressing animated music videos (see, for example, "Paranoid Android") or really much at all about Radiohead in order to present an interesting idea for a video (though again, it has to help). And you don't need to have participated at all in the conversation surrounding the download issue in order to be a fan. If you want, you can just buy Radiohead's album the old-fashioned way, by ordering it shipped right to your door through amazon.com.

Each layer of participation, though, may result in a richer, more layered, and, I suspect, more rewarding relationship to the band and its output. This isn't just about developing a stronger understanding of a musician's creative process. It's about taking part in a larger meaning-making process, in the give-and-take between a pop culture icon and the society that will ultimately pass judgment on the cultural value of the work any icon presents.

Radiohead is not, of course, the first or only band to try to engage fans in such a participatory way; and they're certainly not trying to redefine the fan-musician relationship. Their efforts, in fact, seem to arise more from a commercial impulse than a desire to effect some kind of systemic change. But isn't that part of the point? Radiohead isn't trying to drag its fanbase along its version of the moral high road; it's only trying to figure out how best to reach its fans where they already are--for love, for money, for commercial and cultural success. What's not to love about that?