Pennywise is the latest band to release a music album for free. Their album Reason to Believe is available at Myspace at a bitrate of 320 kbit/s including the pdf booklet and jpg cover. All that needs to be done is to add the user Textango as a friend at Myspace who will send a message that includes the download link. The music is DRM free.

Textango seems to be a mobile music distributor according to Wikipedia. Pennywise is a Punk-Rock band in case you have not heard of them before, comparable to Bad Religion in many aspects.

The album Reason to Believe will also be sold in stores in Europe and America.

Related posts

• Nine Inch Nails’s Music Experiment Successful (1)
• Artists are leaving the sinking ship (24)
• Riaa is sueing Allofmp3 (0)
• Music Industry Thoughts (3)
• DRM Free Songs come to iTunes (0)

The second band that created such a stir was the band Nine Inch Nails with the release of their album Ghosts Volumes One though Four. The first nine songs of the album were available freely on the NIN website with lots of extras including digital extras and a 40-paged PDF document.

Three additional packages were on sale that would add value to the free package. The most expensive one was a $300 deluxe release signed by Trent Reznor that was limited to 2500 copies. That limited release sold out after a couple of days which alone marks this experiment an success.

It should also be noted that the full release has been released under Creative Commons and can be downloaded from various Bittorrent sites throughout the Internet.

Related posts

• Pennywise Reason to Believe Album Free at Myspace (2)
• Completely Ridiculous Radiohead Music Experiment (7)
• Artists are leaving the sinking ship (24)
• Why I wont be using Qtrax (7)
• Walmart To Shut Down DRM Servers (2)

Those bands are big and could influence others to try the same. I personally think it is time for a change. Bands earn (almost) nothing from record sales which is unexplainable to me. I read a nice essay from a music producer earlier who did produce a Nirvana record who said that while the Music Industry earned more than $1.5 Million from selling CDs the band actually made a minus from that.

I’m not an expert but I can predict that more artists will choose the risk of marketing albums on their own instead of making no money at all from it. The big ones will be first. Those who have enough fans and publicity to be able to do that.

But, musicians at the base are also already using the Internet to sell their records without Music Industry contracts. Marketplaces like eMusic or even Jamendo give them the publicity to reach an audience.

The question that arises is simply: Who needs the Record Companies ?

Read More:

Madonna dumps label in $134m deal
Nine Inch Nails
Oasis, Jamiroquai to follow Radiohead
Radiohead

Related posts

• Pennywise Reason to Believe Album Free at Myspace (2)
• Nine Inch Nails’s Music Experiment Successful (1)
• You Are Sharing Files (4)
• The industry fights some unnecessary battles (2)
• RIAA sues all Internet Providers (5)

Several multitrack versions of Nine Inch Nails songs were released as Open Source earlier this year which have been used to create the remixes. So, the band made available some of their songs and the fans used them to create wonderful remixes of those songs.

The songs can be listened to on the official remix website, streamed or downloaded as torrents with a size of roughly 140 Megabytes. I took the liberty to link to the source multitrack songs by Nine Inch Nails which can be downloaded directly from the website listed below.

Read More:

Nine Inch Nails Limitless Potential
Nine Inch Nails Multitrack Songs

Related posts

• Pennywise Reason to Believe Album Free at Myspace (2)
• Nine Inch Nails’s Music Experiment Successful (1)
• YouScrobble A Last.FM And Youtube Mashup Service (6)
• Windows Media Player Import for Winamp (1)
• Winamp iPod Plugin (5)

Call it a publicity stunt of unknown dimensions, a bold move or going with the time it all comes down to the following. Nine Inch Nails will get a huge publicity boost mainly from Internet sites that report about this. They will rise in popularity especially among filesharers and advocates of DRM free music that could very well use the move from NiN to show the world that the new album from Nine Inch Nails is selling well even though it was pre-released on major torrent sites. (not by them of course).

It would be very interesting to analyze the sales of their newest record before and after uploading the three songs to the Piratebay. Nine Inch Nails are the prime example of a band that is not fighting against the new trends of distributing media but use it to their advantage. They realized that the music is no longer the most important factor to decide whether to buy a CD or download it but the additional value that comes with a purchase.

Their newest CD is black at the beginning but becomes white after being played. They hide bonus tracks in encrypted messages on the Cds and offer a great booklet. I was always very disappointed about the booklets of most new CDs and I think this is one of the reasons why people don’t think that buying CDs would give them an additional value. (if you don’t care about the legal – illegal point of view)

Related posts

• Tired of fake torrents ? Block the sources (8)
• Pennywise Reason to Believe Album Free at Myspace (2)
• Artists are leaving the sinking ship (24)
• Youtorrent (2)
• You Are Sharing Files (4)