I agree about the x-mas analogy. Well, has anyone heard of apple's new 99cent download a song?? Well, there's this band. An elecric pop duo that isn't selling jack shit in the stores, yet on this new internet store, they're in the top 10. They've made alot of money from it being downloaded. Apple wasn't expecting this much of a turn out. All it took for the band was for their people to make the right phone calls to the people at this "store" to promote their shit and it sells. They're saying the a small percentage of people use imacs and only 20percent of them have the proper requirements to use this service, yet people have been using it like crazy. Remember back in the day when they had singles??? They're pretty much gone now. It's just not economical to promote a single with a song, the radio edit of that single, a remix, and a b-side for seven bucks.
With this new service, the single is back. 99cents with no bullshit.
Everyone is hopping on the bandwagon. Look up a full depth article on this on Washingtongpost.com in the business section of today's edition.
The cool thing about this is, which makes it thread related, is that bands don't have to make a full concept album. They can just release a song at a time. Which is basically what anthrax did with Superhere, then refused, then what doesn't die, then safe home. Anthrax basically realeased three or four of their songs before they came out. Could you imagine if they were on this service with the proper promotion. I mentioned something about this service when I first heard about it. It's probably way back in the archives. It seemed far fetched at the time but so far it's been an absolute success.