A few weeks ago, I came across a new collaboration between the keyboardist from one of my favorite bands, Vampire Weekend, and the lead singer of Ra Ra Riot. The new band is called Discovery and I recently purchased their album.

Hold on, let me read that back to you. I actually exchanged money for their music. And get this: I didn’t buy it on iTunes either—I went to my local independent record shop, Waterloo Records, to get it.

Wait, what is this, 1998?!

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, is known, among other things, for evangelizing the concept of giving things away and how this “free economy” is the future of business. As luck would have it actually, his latest book Free: The Future of a Radical Price was released the same day as Discovery’s LP (and of course you can read for free in its entirety before ordering it on Amazon). This is not a review for the book (which is a great read), but instead a personal account of why I think Chris is absolutely right in my interaction with the album, which lead to its eventual purchase.

In order to hear a few songs from any band nowadays, you can usually count on visiting the band’s MySpace page or scour The Pirate Bay for some torrents of the album to download before it is released. The internet tends to be a veritable black market of bootlegs and pirated files if you know the right places to look. In the case of Discovery, if you navigated over to their website any time after the official announcement of the collaboration between Batmanglij and Miles, you could actually listen to the album in its entirety. This concept is definitely not new by any stretch, but other elements seemed to play into what lead to my purchase of the physical album.

Of course the tracks on dscvry.net were not downloadable to my computer or iPod, but I could listen to each track as much as I wanted, any time I wanted via a Flash widget on the site (which I could easily embed into my blog or a friend’s MySpace page if I had any friends who used MySpace). After a few listens to the album, I was hooked and definitely wanted to get the album on the day it was released.

The album was going to be available a few days before the release date, digitally from Amie Street, with $2 going to Oxfam. Or if I was patient, it would be available on 7/7 in indie record stores and a few weeks thereafter in major retail outlets like Amazon or Target.

Immediacy is definitely an issue with music, considering how much new music is released every week. A digital download, in this case, was tempting, but didn’t seem like the best option. I feel my final purchase decision was influenced by having the notion present that buying from somewhere like Target was somehow second-rate (the fact that there was no firm date on the release set for the retailer seemed to create that notion in my head).

Since Discovery’s marketing team gave me 1) exposure to a product in its entirety so I could be fully aware of what I was getting into; 2) by clearly defining the channels for me to purchase said product and 3) by placing different weights on the aforementioned channels, causing me to sway one way more than the other options, it’s no wonder eventually led me to purchase the record.

Sometimes companies do things just right and everyone ends up happy in the end. In this case, I have a great summer soundtrack that I don’t have to burn or Dropbox to you. Instead, I can just link you to dscvry.net and you have a listen for yourself.