Michael S. Malone published a really interesting article on popular well-known bands releasing their albums for free. The latest band to release their music for free is Nine Inch Nails. The best part about this release is that fans can do what they want to the music including mixing and reusing it in their own projects.

Why would an artist give away their music? Because they make most of their money from the concerts, t-shirts, and other add-ons, not from selling albums. Years ago, the record companies had the advantage that they were the only source of music distribution: selling records to stores, having music played on the radio, getting music made part of TV and movies, etc. The Internet has completely killed their distribution model. iTunes started the job. MySpace and Facebook with their pages that let artists showcase their own music has finished it off.

While this new freebie system may work for artists, it leaves the big record companies with nothing to contribute with their current business models. That does not mean that the record companies have to die, but they will need to change. In an interview given by Jin-Young Park, a Korean pop music manager, he explains that the big record companies that he meets with don’t get that the CD is dead. He makes his money by cultivating talent and marketing the acts.  Quoting directly from his interview:

When prospective U.S. partners ask music mogul Jin-Young Park where he’s from, he has a conversation-stopping answer: “I’m from the future.”

It’s a deft riposte that opens up space for Park, who discovered and managed Asian pop phenomenon Rain for many years, to spool out a string of facts that make record execs weak in the knees. “In meetings with music labels here, they talk to me about releasing albums,” says Park. “They can’t accept that there’s no such thing anymore. Where I come from, CDs are nothing—they’re just souvenirs. I tell them, ‘Wake up!’”

For all you busy travelers who can’t tune into the radio to find new music or may have forgotten to load your favorite CD onto your MP3 player, Pandora can solve your problems.  Pandora came from the Musical Genome Project.  This volunteer project was to break down all songs in the world into a basic description of its musical properties.  It essentially was trying to define the musical DNA of each song in its database.

Pandora is easy to use.  Surf to the Pandora web site using your high speed Internet connection and tell Pandora what are your favorite artists and/or songs.  It will take your starting list of favorites and match it with other songs by other artists that have similar DNA. All of the songs, the ones you know and the ones you are just discovering, are served directly to you over your personal Pandora “station.”  You can mix the song styles to create your own personal Internet “radio” stations. 

The best part for travelers is that your music is always on the Internet for you.  The only down side is that you are going to need a high speed connection.  Pandora can also have trouble if the server that you are using is configured to prevent streaming. 

Try it out, and let me know how well it works for you.   

Technorati tags: travel, Internet, radio, music, Pandora, personalization, streaming music