Marillion - Free the Album

Marillion - a band from UK is giving their album for free. Absolutely Free. Just go to google look for their latest album’s torrent and start downloading. We think it is absolutely fantastic to see more bands giving music away for free. From Marillion’s wesbite -

Today, Marillion become the first band anywhere in the world to release their new album (Happiness Is the Road) legally using P2P (Peer to Peer) internet networks for distribution.

However, they are not the first band ever, really. Some musicians have been giving away their music for a while using bit torrents, check out Jamendo. But still, given Marillion are quite a big band, this is an fantastic development. Much better than what Radiohead did - allowing downloads from their site, even though the traffic demands meant the Radiohead album was downloaded a lot using torrents.

Marillion is asking people to support them in return for giving away the album by coming to their, concerts and buy merchandise like T-shirts. Again, fantastic. Though they haven’t opened themselves to the idea of voluntary payments, which Radiohead did.

So there we are - giving away music is reaching mainstream quicker than we expected. There are a number of ways to make a living from your music. The first part is to let your music reach as many listeners as possible.