The strategy eventually included six different websites and sub-sites set up before and after the release of the album. And that’s in addition to the use of existing sites such as Murmur, the band’s community website and forum (which evolved out of Ethan’s original fan site), where bootleg audio of the songs started appearing months before the official release, taken from live rehearsals and promotional events. There was also REMDublin.com, which was set up as a central place for fans who attended the band’s Dublin 5-night series of shows to congregate and share their experiences. As Ethan notes: “Michael Stipe encouraged people to photograph and videotape the shows from the stage.”

The band set up a similar site later on called REMHQ Tour, which aggregated all fan-created content — Twitter comments, Flickr photos, blog posts, YouTube videos and so on. I checked it out several times, and it was an incredible, almost real-time view of what fans were thinking and doing, and there was some excellent material there that would likely never have been seen by as many people if it was scattered all over dozens of Web services. Ethan says in the second part of his series that the site got over 3000 items submitted.

At the end, Ethan says:

“The beauty of all of this of course is that none of this would have been possible ten years ago. While people cry for the old days of the music business, I find it exciting that we can experiment so willingly and easily (and cost effectively) with technology. The very technology people say would be the death of the industry is the very technology which provided REM and WBR the ability to stretch our boundaries [and] help a band reinvent themselves.”

Hear, hear. Record executives and artists alike should read — and then re-read — Ethan’s posts.

The album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, can be streamed through the associated website, and the widget player can be embedded anywhere — an option I’m surprised more bands don’t take advantage of. The songs can be streamed for free (and one can be downloaded free of charge), and the rest can be bought through the site in a variety of formats, including what Byrne calls “a limited edition deluxe package designed by Sagmeister Inc.” All formats can be downloaded immediately, the site says, while physical CD versions will be shipped in the fall. The digital-only package is $8.99 for 329kbps mp3 files with no DRM controls, and also includes a 17-page lyric booklet.

The release is also one of the first big releases involving Topspin Media, the technical support system for artists that former Yahoo Music executive (and former Winamp exec) Ian Rogers and some partners formed earlier this year. He has a post about it on the Topspin blog.

There are iPhones and Nokia mobiles, not surprisingly, but also PlayStations (portables and PS3s), Nintendo Wiis, Danger smartphones and others. As Ethan notes in the post, this is just one part of an ongoing evolution in Web access, with more and more people using their phones and high-definition TVs (as billionaire Mark Cuban points out in typically bombastic fashion) to browse content — and that will have an impact on how content is designed, delivered and consumed. What exactly that impact is, of course, no one really knows, but there’s no question that Google is thinking about what that means.

This danger, which Westergren describes in the Washington Post story linked above, isn’t new. The Pandora founder was warning about it in interviews over a year ago, and so were other Internet audio players. The freight train that is currently bearing down on Pandora and similar services got underway more than six years ago, and since then there has been much frantic lobbying by both sides. Finally, last year, a federal agency boosted the rate that Internet radio stations have to pay — it has already doubled, and by 2010 will have tripled. Westergren says the licensing fees that Pandora has to pay this year will consume about 70 per cent of the company’s revenues of about $25-million.

As many people have pointed out — including Doc Searls, who posted a good overview last year — the music industry clearly sees Internet radio as an opportunity to institute fees that it hasn’t been able to get from regular radio stations (although outside of the United States, payments to artists based on radio play are fairly common). Not surprisingly, the industry has been trying to change that state of affairs as well, in many cases using the Internet radio decisions for leverage, and even going so far as to argue that radio airplay is a “form of piracy.”

Obviously, some of what Westergren is saying — and has been saying for the past year or more — is designed to put pressure on the music industry and get it to agree to lower royalty rates, something the Washington Post says is being promoted by at least one congressman. But all hyperbole and spin aside, if those rates don’t get reduced there appears to be a very real chance that services like Pandora may cease to exist, and I think that would leave us all a little poorer as a result — and not just music listeners, but musicians as well.