Digital Download Model Puts Song Exposure Above Sales

Mash-up artist Girl Talk's new album, Feed the Animals comes with some impressive numbers: About 300 sampled songs on 14 tracks that play for a manic 55 minutes. One number it doesn't come with, however, is a price.

That's because Girl Talk, as Gregg Gillis calls himself, is adopting the model pioneered by artists such as Radiohead that allows fans to name their own price for a digital download of his new album. Although Radiohead never disclosed how many downloads it sold, it didn't appear to harm CD sales when the album was released several months later.

Gillis' strategy will test whether an independent artist who has never benefited from the backing of a major record label can build an audience and generate income on the experimental pay-what-you-want model. At the same time, Feed the Animals must maintain a low-enough profile to ensure the samples -- brief excerpts from other artists' music -- used without permission on the album go uncontested by their copyright holders.

“It's a perfect model for the kinds of acts that appeal to a devoted group of fans who are older than teenagers on average, and who are computer literate," said Aram Sinnreich, managing partner at Radar Research, a media consulting firm. “Anybody who's a fan of remixes and mash-ups is going to be inclined in that direction."

Several retailers -- including iTunes -- wouldn't sell Gillis' 2006 “Night Ripper" when it was released because he had not obtained permission to use the samples in the album. This time, however, there is no middleman to block sales.