While the vast majority of music consumers still buy CD albums, they are buying less of them, while digital tracks are exploding: According to Nielsen SoundScan, sales of physical CDs this year have declined 20 percent from the same point in 2006, from 112 million to 89 million. Digital tracks are up to 288 million from 242 million at the same period last year. And that's not counting the millions of singles that are illegally downloaded.

"Now, we're in a very difference place in terms of the single business," Jim Donio, president of National Association of Recording Merchandisers, said in an interview. "The single business is alive and well, and it's in the form of track downloads."

This seems to confirm our suspicion that the albums market of the early millennium was artificially inflated by the relative lack of availability of singles. Remember 1998? After Billboard did away with the "physical release" requirement for Hot 100 inclusion in December of that year, more and more albums-that-shoulda-been-maxi-singles made their way into stores. While that fattened profits and sales tallies (the RIAA established the Diamond award, for more than 10 million units shipped) in 1999), we suspect that it also had the probably-not-all-that-inadvertent effect of making a lot of customers, including us, feel ripped off. ("You Get What You Give" may be a fantastic pop song, but any of you who have ever listened to the rest of that New Radicals album know what we're talking about)

The single returns to haunt music biz [AP via Yahoo!]

By giving away the album in its entirety on May 13, the band hope to widen their fanbase and ultimately make more money from touring, merchandising and licensing deals than they would from sales of the album.

Despite selling a respectable 35,000 copies of their debut album, Tragedy Rocks, and making the top 40 with the single Lottery Winners On Acid, the band were last year dropped by their record label, Warner Music.

Like its major-label rivals, it is struggling with the structural changes to the record industry and, say critics, is increasingly unable to invest in long-term artist development.

The experiment is being watched closely by the industry and other artists struggling with the conundrum of how to make money at a time when CD sales are collapsing and margins are decreasing as a result of increased competition.

According to their MySpace page, the band is currently in Beijing, and their next two months are going to consist of one solid tour—one on which, they claim, they're going to get a greater piece of the door-charge pie than they might have in the past. Will people go out to see them? Well, that depends on whether there's a large live-music market for Conor Oberst devotees in the UK. (Seriously, there's one song on there that sounds like Bright Eyes fronting the London Quireboys.) But what we're wondering is how the album was financed. Was work on it started before or after the band got dropped from its major label? Did they have day jobs, or did they go into debt, Kevin Smith-style? Because it's all well and good if their strategy pays off once the album was released—but we're interested in how the act was able to get to this point in the first place, because that seems to be the key aspect of the "free-music" push that's often overlooked.

(Confidential to the Guardian copyeditor who wrote this story's headline: "Revolution"? What, are you fresh from the NME?)

Album giveaway could ignite music revolution [Guardian Music]

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