![Forget “pay what you want.” The new model for the music industry may be “pay it forward.” Coldplay has become the latest band to discover that giving away your music - even a little bit for a little time - may, in the long run, end up being worth more than the conventional model of only selling it. To drum up publicity for its new single, “Violet Hill,” which was released last week, the band decided to give it away for a week on its Web site as a free download. On the first day it was available, the song was downloaded more than 600,000 times, according to Billboard magazine. In 2005, “Speed of Sound,” the lead single from Coldplay’s previous album, “X&Y,” sold about 53,000 copies digitally in the United States and the United Kingdom in its first week of release and that was with a marketing campaign and far more anticipation following the breakthrough of their Grammy-winning smash album, “A Rush of Blood to the Head.”
[Also ran in Kansas City Star, San Angelo Standard-Times]](http://8.media.tumblr.com/NLbrVHkDv9h4y0gpd4hCS8P6_500.jpg)
Forget “pay what you want.” The new model for the music industry may be “pay it forward.”
Coldplay has become the latest band to discover that giving away your music - even a little bit for a little time - may, in the long run, end up being worth more than the conventional model of only selling it.
To drum up publicity for its new single, “Violet Hill,” which was released last week, the band decided to give it away for a week on its Web site as a free download. On the first day it was available, the song was downloaded more than 600,000 times, according to Billboard magazine. In 2005, “Speed of Sound,” the lead single from Coldplay’s previous album, “X&Y,” sold about 53,000 copies digitally in the United States and the United Kingdom in its first week of release and that was with a marketing campaign and far more anticipation following the breakthrough of their Grammy-winning smash album, “A Rush of Blood to the Head.”
[Also ran in Kansas City Star, San Angelo Standard-Times]
