Giving Away Albums For Free

[bran]

i really dont see the big deal. yeah putting the album in everyones itunes might be a bit much but bands giving away free downloads to their albums or name your price downloads has been done for a long time by a bunch of bands.

[wasted]

U2 could be relevant to the destruction of music. It's kind of cool for them because they already made it. But for new bands who don't get iTunes deals there's just not really a way to really be successful. I'm not sure if that is true but it's a possible scenario. There's so many hipster bands because they don't need a video budget they just post pencil drawing sketches of a video they would make on Facebook. Do hipsters use Facebook?

Facebook uses hipsters. Bread and butter. And self centered bitches and big brother.

Facebook has destroyed rock n roll. Everything is so safe. Slash has to put his record out through Classic rock magazine. U2 don't even trust their own fans to buy it so put it out on iTunes to get money up front. I reckon if there is another Axl Rose out there he's probably medicated and playing candy crash on his phone.

[dalsh327]

A computer company is distributing their music, not a record company.

They're taking the safe route, as GNR did (with the Best Buy deal), and as Prince did (20Ten being handed out with newspapers but only in England, it was never released in America), with taking a large amount of money (probably somewhere in between 5 to 100 million) which covered all of the sessions, as well as the upcoming (but who knows when) Songs of Experience. If they had put the album out the traditional way, the numbers would probably be somewhere in between 50,000 to 250,000 the first week. 50,000 is what Mariah sold. 250,000 is what Katy Perry sold. 250,000 is also what Chinese Democracy sold....5 years ago.

Without Steve Jobs, there was no "wow factor" with the new iPhone (although good luck finding the phone), but the excitement isn't really there. Yeah people will still get on line and want to be the first. and it's turned into a joke with the phones bending. So bring back his old buddy Bono. I think it's all about potshots at the big dogs.

The ways of distributing music are being criticized, even Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter campaign was controversial because she's married to Neil Gaiman, who is far from poor, going hat in hand to fans, but it put Kickstarter on the map.

Up and coming artists have way more options at how they distribute music than a band like U2 did. They had a savvy manager and a record company with a label head that empowered them with the rights to the masters. Few artists have been allowed that.

All these surprise releases are a phase. A lot of people will try to duplicate the move, but this has replaced the midnight album releases when album releases were a big deal. If GNR put UYI out now, they probably wouldn't have done something like this because they were still a fairly new band but TSI might have been.