After a six years sales decline and negative PR surrounding lawsuits against 15,000 individuals, a recent experiment by Pearl Jam offers a glimmer of hope that major record labels and their customers may be reconciling.

Nielsen SoundScan figures through the week ending July 2 show that sales of digital albums soared 126% during the first half of the year, while digital tracks rose 77%. This does not make up for the decline in physical album sales, but it shows that the prospect of getting paid for music online, despite of P2P? services offering the same pirated albums and tracks for free, is not that far-fetched after all.

An interesting experiment was recently conducted with Pearl Jam’s video for “Life Wasted”, involving releasing it to be used freely from the label J-Records under what is called “The Creative Commons Licence”, which means that consumers can legally copy, distribute and share it without restriction.

The idea is to create buzz online that will drive sales of CD’s and legal downloads. Did it work? Pearl Jam’s new album reached number 2 on the Billboard chart and has so far spent 9 weeks on their top 200 album chart. The single “Life Wasted” reached number 10 on the singles chart. It is not by far a moster hit like some of the band’s earlier records, but it is no catastrophe either. After all, it shows that even if you give away the music for free legally, there are opportunities to sell it -- and people may still buy it.

Related Links:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/music/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002800615

http://www.jrecords.com/

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/bio/index.jsp?pid=5392