Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 26, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The US band R.E.M. is following in the footsteps of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. Like their fellow musicians, R.E.M. is now offering its new album “Accelerate” for free on the Internet. Even before the album officially reaches physical and virtual stores, it can be heard as an online stream from March 24 to 26.
With this time limit, R.E.M. is admittedly showing somewhat less courage than Radiohead, for example, who offered their latest work online for several months and left fans to decide the price.
Nevertheless, this type of marketing takes R.E.M. in a direction that more and more musicians are coming to appreciate. The iLike platform, however, proved somewhat unsteady in the face of the rush of users to the offering on Tuesday afternoon and was temporarily unavailable.
“The exploitation rights to a work belong to the rights holder. They themselves must be able to decide how to distribute their content, whether for a fee or in advance as a free live stream on the Internet,” Christine Ehlers, spokeswoman for the Society for the Prosecution of Copyright Infringement (GVU), tells the online news service pressetext. But this also means that paid business models must be implemented and respected alongside free offerings, Ehlers adds. In principle, the GVU welcomes the testing of new legal distribution channels. “A successful strategy against the illegal market must operate on several levels,” is the rights holders’ position.
Michael Stipe, singer and frontman of R.E.M., explained the move by saying that you can either move with the times or sit back and watch others overtake you. The band had decided to stay at the forefront. In addition to iLike.com, “Accelerate” can also be accessed from the social networking site Facebook. The streaming application is integrated into the platform, making the software available to all Facebook users as well.
Fundamentally, the US band has not launched a groundbreaking initiative with the online stream. What is new, however, is that the album is being offered online before its official release. But while Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” could be downloaded in full, “Accelerate” remains a brief Internet pleasure – except for technically gifted users who may try to record the songs online. From the end of the month, “Accelerate” will then come onto the market as a conventional CD and as a DVD edition. Online, the album will in future be available to buy from iTunes.
R.E.M. is the next big name in the music business to pursue its own new paths in online marketing. And once again, it shows that more and more musicians are seeking and implementing innovative marketing opportunities. For the music industry, artists’ self-marketing activities, some of whom are already dispensing entirely with a record company, are not quite as welcome as they are for users. Nevertheless, the associations still see piracy as the main problem. Musicians taking marketing into their own hands was nothing new; digital distribution channels now made this option easier, IFPI spokesman Thomas Böhm told pressetext.
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