Turn It Up - A guided tour through the worlds of pop, rock and rap | Chicago Tribune | Blog

From a post in Greg Kot's Turn it Up blog in the Chicago Tribune: "On Tuesday, Radiohead will release one of the year’s most anticipated albums, “In Rainbows.” It’s the U.K. band’s seventh album, and first in four years, and the band

The story goes on to report that, despite the availability of pirated pre-release copies of the band's three previous albums, each one debuted in the top five in the Billboard charts.

So it appears that Radiohead, like Prince, is by-passing the conventional route and distributing it's music on its own terms.

This trend will continue, as more and more artists figure out that they don't need a record company. The industry will eventually have to figure out a new way to make money, though it's clear that competition from an increasing number of independent artists will spread the wealth a lot thinner than record company execs will like.