When life hands you lemons...

The past few years have seen much boohooing by the music industry as a whole. Meanwhile, a few brave souls are trying their own experiments in the brave new world.

A while back, Barenaked Ladies announced they were selling their latest album at concerts on a USB thumbdrive, with all the tracks unprotected, and asking users to mash them up at will.

This week, Radiohead announced that their latest album would be available for download at whatever price the customer saw fit to pay.

They are brave souls. Sure, the fact that they are already somewhat successful makes the experiments a little less painful should they fail, but it also makes the downside of failure that much larger. Anyhow, I tip my hat to them.

It's interesting that in many ways this is comparable to some early shareware/donationware models for software, including games.

So can we in the games business learn from their lessons, or have we already learned something they aren't aware of?