Will We Ever Pay for an Album Again?

Now, add to that the news last week that Coldplay was offering a free downloadable track, "Violet Hill," from its upcoming album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. So great was the demand by downloaders that Coldplay's Web site temporarily crashed.

Nevertheless, this Wednesday the band announced that two million downloads of the track had already taken place — its spokesperson proudly announcing that "It would have outsold the whole of last week's top 40 [singles] four times over."

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In other words, in the last six months, the world's greatest band, the world's most admired cult band, and the world's most popular band have all decided to give their creations — worth tens of millions of dollars — away to their fans. That's the trifecta folks: popular music will never again be the same.

You might have dismissed Radiohead's move as just the latest of leader Thom Yorke's wacky anti-capitalist crusades, and Coldplay's move as just clever PR for its new album and tour (and, somehow, Chris Martin's own Fair Trade crusade) — but with NIN now in the game, its hard to argue that this is anything but a harbinger of the future. Had only Mariah Carey given away part of her new album E=MC2 — yeah, like that would happen — this wave would have become instant tsunami.

Still and all, I now think there is no going back. With bands this big now pursuing a whole new "open source" business model with their music, it's going to be very difficult for any group to try to market their new albums through traditional distribution channels using standard retail pricing schemes. And that, in turn, means that the death of the established music industry, which until now seemed like a long slide to oblivion, is now much more imminent.

The simple fact is that you can't compete with free, especially if you are locked (through heavy capital investment in facilities and recording and manufacturing equipment, as well as traditional hierarchal corporate models) into the old way of doing business.

If you can't sell your core product — i.e., recorded music — then you have to make money from secondary sources. In the music world, that secondary business includes tours, promotional items and specialty packaging … all of which are owned by the bands themselves.