Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Jamiroquai, Oasis, Prince and now Madonna. Although she is not going direct like some artists, but rather going without a record label. Finally the walls are crumbling.
On a side note: I downloaded the Rainbow album on Tuesdays when it came out. I got an MP3 version of the files in very good quality (160 kbps) and DRM-less. The only interesting thing to note was the procedure it took to get it into my hands. Sign into the web page, enter my credit card info, received a confirmation email. Since it was pre-released I had to wait till Tuesday. In the meantime they sent me a pre-release notification email:
THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IN RAINBOWS. THIS IS AN UPDATE.
YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT TOMORROW MORNING (UK TIME). THIS WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.
HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:
THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.
MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT, YOU NEED TO GET WINZIP OR ZIPIT INSTALLED PRIOR.
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THEM HERE:
PC: http://www.winzip.com/
MAC: http://www.maczipit.com/IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS DOWNLOADING YOUR FILE, PLEASE CONTACT OUR DOWNLOAD CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAM AT
And after that I got the actual email for the download. Three emails plus sign up. It’s nice that artists are going direct, but we are really going to need music brokers (i.e. iTunes, AmazonMP3 etc) to make it even easier and cheaper.
(Via TechCrunch.)