An interesting marketing ploy.

LONDON (Reuters) - Radiohead, one of the world’s most influential rock bands, plans to sell its new album from its Web site as a digital download and let fans choose what they want to pay.

With music sales in decline globally for seven successive years, the industry is engaged in a debate over how best to reverse the trend.

Radiohead said its seventh studio album “In Rainbows” would be available from Radiohead.com from October 10 in MP3 format, meaning it can be played on all digital devices. In the latest twist in the move to digital music, fans can choose how much to pay, or can pay nothing if they prefer.

Ultimately, I wonder if the days of the “music label” aren’t over.  With the internet allowing a direct conduit between artists and their audiences, why does anyone need a record company?  Sure the marketing and such is nice, but it’s hard to get those people to notice you.  And once they do notice you, it’s hard to get them to stop meddling with your work.

With bandwidth costs at all-time lows, and anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge able to set up a workable website, most artists could conceivably publish their music online (choosing to either charge their audience or simply give the music away), sell their merchandise online and promote their own tours online.  It’d still be a long and hard road out of obscurity for most bands, but it’s that way already.  At least this way they’d be working for themselves.

Radiohead’s move is particularly interesting as the band is already established enough that they could pretty much give their albums away and still make millions just through touring alone.  And if they cut out the overhead of their music label taking a pound of flesh...who knows.  I guess I’m not much in tune with the metrics of the music industry, but it seems like a business model that could work.

Regardless, these are interesting times in the free market world.