1. Bandcamp: RWW reviewed Bandcamp earlier and dubbed this service the "MySpace Music Killer". The company offers bands the chance to upload liner notes, album arts and links to their materials through an online DIY store. In this case, interactivity is not bundled with the album downloads, but rather found in a link on the site.

2. Songbird: Songbird is the open-source Mozilla-based music player that offers users a chance to listen to albums while also viewing information about artists through various in-browser plugins. Songbird offers the basic functionality of an "interactive album" with lyrics and album art; however, fans can also add extensions to trade mix tapes, publish their playback histories to Last.FM and publish their listening history to Twitter.

3. Songkick: Songkick is a concert recommendation engine with a music history component. The site allows users to upload concert-related photos, liner notes, poster art, videos and even ticket stubs. The community is a live music wiki updated by those die hard fans who've not only attended the concerts, but also documented the experience. For Bob Dylan alone, the community has uploaded information on 2788 past concerts in 767 cities.

Apart from their interactivity and great social components, one thing that BandCamp, Songbird and Songkick have in common is the fact that they are not Apple. While each of the services are wonderful in their own right, Apple's potential commitment to interactive albums can set an industry-wide precedent on how albums are released. By providing listeners with liner notes, videos and background information, fans may find themselves connecting with their music on a whole new level.

Band history, politics and cultural context can affect whether or not we part with our money. I'm going to take a wild guess that Hasidic Jewish reggae artist Matisyahu's highest download numbers don't come from Muslim music fans. And do you think Radiohead's name-your-own-price In Rainbows album would have made as much money if the group wasn't known for its activism?

The interactive album tells us where artists have come from and how they're using their voices outside of the music. A number of services provide the delivery framework for the information, but only Apple provides direct access to mainstream audiences. Regardless of whether or not the independent labels follow suit, these new band dossiers give us the social narrative we need to make informed choices as consumers.

Why Pay for Free Music?

Trent Reznor himself questioned the viability of the 'free' music model earlier this year, but clearly, his own band has been able to make it work. While overall album sales were down last year (even when accounting for digital downloads), bands like the Nine Inch Nails have been able to leverage their fanbase and bypass the traditional music industry channels, while still making a profit.

On the Creative Commons blog, Fred Benenson asks why people chose to pay for the NIN album even though they could have had it for free. While, as he points out, ease of use is surely one reason, most fans probably simply want to support their favorite musicians by actually paying them directly for their music.

All of this is further proof that Web technology has gone mainstream in the music business.

The Guns n Roses MySpace page is impressive. It offers the full album online, a couple of days before the official release in stores. True GNR fans, including this author, will still buy the album when it is released. But by promoting the album online a couple of days before release, it encourages new fans and gives Guns n Roses a lot of free publicity and viral uptake on the Internet. This will almost certainly increase overall sales.

While Guns n Roses hasn't gone as far as Radiohead did with their latest album In Rainbows - which was released as a 'pay what you want' download before it was even an actual CD product - Guns n Roses and MySpace is an appropriate partnership for both parties. For Guns n Roses, it allows them to reach a young, hip, massive audience. And for MySpace, it gives them a lot of page views and we presume a very healthy profit from the record label and retailers such as Best Buy (which has a banner ad right at the top of the page). We should also point out that Guns n Roses has employed some heavy handed tactics to stop illegal file-sharing of the album, so they haven't been entirely savvy about the Web. Still, the MySpace promotion is inspired.

We've been impressed by many of the online music services this year - last.fm has continued to evolve its web services, Imeem has been a revelation for many music fans, Pandora's traffic continues to grow despite ongoing legal issues, sites like The Hype Machine (our coverage) and Muxtape (when it was available) offer something new and different, and so on.

But we're also noticing some of the more traditional radio stations vastly improving their Web sites - and NPR is a great example of that. NPR Music is currently marking its one year anniversary. It features content from NPR and 12 of its public radio stations, but what's impressed us has been the "original-to-NPR Music features" such as live performances, studio sessions, first listens to forthcoming albums, and interviews. This author is a subscriber to NPR's All Songs Considered podcast, which has recently featured a full Radiohead concert and a Guest DJ appearance by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke.

I want my MTV? Not anymore. I can get everything I want in my Web browser! Although to be fair, even MTV has moved its music to the Web.

Until May 1st, the public can vote for their favorite remix, and remix authors can use a MySpace or Facebook widget to allow fans on social networks to vote for them. The prize, though, is just that Radiohead promises to "listen to the best."

So interesting idea, but like the rest of Radiohead's innovative marketing techniques, this one also feels a bit gimmicky. Requiring entrants to purchase the source files, and then offering as a prize only that the band will listen to the winning entries is somewhat lame in our book. Still, the site has already collected 142 remixes, so some great new music could come out of this for Radiohead fans.

Further, Radiohead has perhaps inspired many other mainstream musical acts to take the plunge and embrace alternative methods of distribution. Nine Inch Nails released an album via BitTorrent, REM open sourced their music videos and streamed their new album on iLike, and Pennywise put their album on MySpace. We may be able to credit Radiohead with making distribution experimentation cool, which can only mean a win for consumers in the long run.

Image credit: Steve Rhodes

The Radiohead In Rainbows contest is being run a bit differently in that they've partnered with an independent video site, are focusing on animation, and are using a tiered voting approach that allows fans to be involved with picking the winner. Further, any song on the album is eligible for being turned into a video, which means fans will in many ways get to define the band's first single.

Until April 27th, anyone can submit a storyboard or clip to Aniboom detailing their idea for a Radiohead video. Users will vote on the 10 best, who will then each be given $1,000 to create a one minute version of their concept. The band will choose the winner, who will receive a $10,000 budget to make the full video for the band in June.

Check out the storyboard example below:

That's very much like the advice that Marshall Kirkpatrick gave to Reznor writing on this blog in January after Reznor complained about the download-to-pay ratio the pay-if-you-want Saul Williams album that Reznor produced received late last year. "Times are changing and if you can, it's better to work on innovating along with them than it is to make dragging your feet and suing people your business model," advised Kirkpatrick.

At the time, Reznor wrote that he was "disheartened" that just 28,322 of the 154,449 people who downloaded Williams' album chose to pay the $5 for a higher quality copy. At the same time, though, that's nearly as many as who bought Williams' previous traditional CD release in 2004 (which sold 33,897 copies) and far more who are hearing his music -- which could theoretically translate to increased concert ticket and merchandise sales. Further, because by not dealing with a label the artist is likely taking a much larger cut of the download revenue than they would receive of CD sales revenue, Williams probably made more money on fewer transactions this time around.

Clearly, Reznor was not disheartened enough to forgo trying a similar type of release for his own new album. Ghosts I-IV part I is available as a free download on the NIN site, as well as on BitTorrent. The entire album is available as a $5 download, a $10 double CD, a $75 "deluxe" package with CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray copies, and a $300 "ultra-deluxe" edition that also includes vinyl copies and signed giclee art prints. The $5 download can also be had via Amazon -- where the album has quickly shot up to the #1 spot on the sales charts.

The 9-track free edition of the album is licensed under a Creative Commons license and is free for non-commercial use. "We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc." said the band in release notes.

Conclusions

While it is impossible to predict how this release will fare compared with previous traditional NIN releases, that may not be a fair question. The dynamics of the music industry have changed and artists like Reznor and Radiohead are blazing new trails as they attempt to figure out how to best release music under these changing market conditions. If 18.3% of downloaders pay -- as they did for Williams -- then that's probably not a bad number for NIN, who can bet that they'll get far more downloads than Williams (Ghosts is already the most downloaded torrent at The Pirate Bay) and will presumably be pocketing most of the revenue.

What do you think? Is Reznor's release a harbinger of the future of the music industry? Let us know your thoughts on the issue in the comments.

"According to our poll US$5-9 is the most popular price range that people are willing to pay for the digital download version. That pricing will be virtually all profit to Radiohead, so the download version will make some money for the band," he wrote. "However the eventual single CD release will reach a much wider audience, so the physical CD will end up being the pot of gold at the end of In Rainbows."

The latest UK album charts have In Rainbows sitting pretty at #1. Because the Internet download version is no longer available, it is clear that Radiohead's main goal for the gimmick was to promote the planned CD release of their album. It would appear they were successful in that regard, but appearances can be deceiving. To be fair, it is way too early to tell what effect the In Rainbows online promotion had on the band's CD sales, so what follows is purely hypothetical.

It was certainly not hard for Richard to predict that a CD release for Radiohead would be a "pot of gold." The band's last 4 albums have reached #1 in the UK, and none of the bands albums have thus far failed to go platinum there. Even in the US, where the band's popularity has cooled since the late 90s, a gold record is nearly guaranteed for Radiohead. So Internet promotion or no, a hot selling CD was in the cards for Thom Yorke and company.

What we don't know yet, is how In Rainbows CD sales will compare with the band's past albums. Could it be that by offering essentially a prerelease of the album online, the band cannibalized future CD sales? Did the eventual cancellation of the download promotion and release of a traditional CD alienate early-adopters and cause them not to want to buy the album? Or did instead the Internet release merely attract casual fans who would not likely have purchase the CD anyway? These are all interesting questions, but it is still to early to form any definitive conclusions from Radiohead's experiment.