REM Joins The Club – Kind Of
Radiohead was one of the first bands to release an album for free over the internet, but they later wound up releasing a regular album and taking their download links down. They also view the effort as something of a failure, and Trent Reznor chalks this up to them being insincere. Reznor points out that the album was poor quality and not released under Creative Commons.
What we have here is a band that dabbled in these kinds of open source concepts, and wound up failing as a result. We also have a band that jumped into the philosophy whole-hog, releasing the album for free in high quality and under a copyleft license, which wound up being extremely successful.
We see this happen quite frequently in the open source world. Sometimes companies will start open projects but still exert a great deal of control over them, preventing outsiders from becoming committers or otherwise stifling the community. Projects that start this way often fail, and they are largely rejected by the community from which they are seeking support. It's no surprise that these album releases, given the open-source-style nature of them, follow a pattern that is often observed in the open source world. Embracing the concepts entirely winds up being better in the long run. Doing it insincerely results in failure.
REM has recently released a new album for free on the internet as well, but in a format even more crippled than the Radiohead release. This album is only available for streaming (not download) in low quality, for a limited time, and only on a specific proprietary web site. If the failure/success of these albums depends on some part on how sincerely they embrace the open philosophy, then we should expect the REM album to be a failure. Of course, only time will tell if that's actually the case.
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Can’t keep a good idea down. Don’t know if you knew it or not, but Harvey Danger released their album free via their website over two years ago. They also list a set of reasons why they were doing it: http://harveydanger.com/press/why.php.