Coldplay Has Hot Track...For Free!!

It seems as though every band who has released a free single or album over the past year (Trent Reznor, Radiohead, and now Coldplay) are laughing these days...all the way to the bank. For both Reznor and Radiohead, each experiment with free music was a huge success in many ways, not just selling music (yea, people still paid for the music even though it was free including yours truly as I'm one of the few people who still prefer a physical album copy to a digital only version...weird, I know).

Bands releasing free music have seen tremendous increases in website traffic, often times causing sites to temporarily crash due to such a huge onslaught of traffic. They have also increased exposure to people who may not have purchased songs, including radio listeners as Coldplay's "Violet Hill" managed to creep up into the top 40 on BBC radio reaching an estimated 33 million listeners across Europe. Undoubtedly this was due in part because people were able to download the song and then wanted to hear it on the radio.

So what seems to be the result of offering free music is a large amount of sales (in the album, concert tickets, etc), increased exposure, not to mention that this is generally considered the best thing a band can do by its fans only causing them to be even bigger supporters of said band. Seems like a win win win (option #5) situation for the band, fans, and label.

The true test for this type of outlet, as MG Siegler points out, is if this will actually work for small bands who don't have the kind of exposure that Radiohead, Reznor (Nine Inch Nails), and Coldplay have. However, if you've been paying close attention, a great deal of bands have been doing this for quite some time through places such as myspace, personal websites, Napster/Kazaa (pre-Metalica/RIAA shutdown), and various other digital forms of socialness.

So the question is have these bands actually benefited from being able to free expose themselves to the masses? Yes and no. Yes in that people can access them and No in that any schmo can upload his/her song and clutter the already extremely over-populated world of "indie" music with not that many great ways to distinguish the good from the bad.

However, big picture in tact, we'll most definitely be seeing more free music from major bands, as well as small unknown bands, in the near and hopefully distant future.

More on Coldplay's Single:
Coldplay's Play: Free for All?
MG Siegler at VentureBeat
Chris Picks
Stereogum's Take