"I'm making more money by giving away my music for free than when I was a Warner Music recording artist," Quirk, a vocalist, said. Sometimes, he said, hardcore Too Much Joy fans pay as much as $150 to download a single album from the band's website. The fact that fans will voluntarily pay so much for an album has a lot to do with the goodwill that the bands generate. This is what Radiohead is shooting for.

The key to understanding the changes rocking the music industry, Quirk argues, is to see that the value proposition inherent in record sales is changing.

The idea of owning music is heavily entrenched in popular culture, as evidenced by the zeal with which music aficionados build and maintain their prized record and CD collections. But the arrival of broadband internet and the MP3 digital music format has created the possibility of a new way of thinking about music ownership, Quirk argues.

"Music is moving away from being a product and moving toward becoming a service," Quirk said. In other words, with access to massive databases of music that are distributed over the web, consumers no longer need to own individual albums and songs. They can simply access songs they want to hear at any time from a master database, for a simple monthly price, kind of like getting cable TV. This is the subscription model championed by Rhapsody.

Here's the deal Rhapsody is offering: For $15 per month, Rhapsody users have access to 4.5 million songs from virtually every artist. The company is adding 10,000 songs per day to its catalog, Quirk said, adding that over 1 billion songs a year are played on Rhapsody.

Quirk acknowledges there are some artists who have refused to license their music to Rhapsody—or anyone else. But the number of holdouts is shrinking every year. On Monday, Led Zeppelin announced that after years of resisting the lure of online distribution, it would offer its songs over the web beginning with an exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless to sell ringtones and other mobile features.

The subscription model has also been championed by Rick Rubin, the Buddha-like co-chairman of Sony/BMG's Columbia Records, who has argued that it is the only realistic alternative to the "99 cent" model championed by Apple, whose iTunes music store and iPod music player currently dominate the digital music market.

Last month, in a widely discussed article, Rubin, whom the record companies have apparently anointed as their savior, told Lynn Hirschberg of the New York Times that "the world has changed. And the industry has not." He said the industry's salvation would come through the subscription model.

"You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like," Rubin told Hirschberg, including mobile devices. "The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now."