The band has thrown the record company model in the drink. According to WBEZ's "Sound Opinions" they have moved well over a million albums, with roughly 2/3, or 700,000 units pulling an average of $10 ea. in the honor-system set-your-own-price experiment.

A company that allowed 1/3 of its customers to simply shoplift them might be considered crazy or stupid. But companies spend billions on advertising, which gets them a tiny percentage of viewers as actual customers. In other words, essentially all the ad money is a waste, except for a handful that become customers. But it's worth it, apparently.

When Live Nation announced it would become a record company with Madonna, it seemed to turn things backward. Tours, which used to promote album sales, now make more profit than the CDs they supposedly promoted. The CD is really just an advertisement, now, so it makes sense for a tour-support company to issue its own CDs to promote tours. After all, while the recording costs money to make, paying musicians and studio time, it costs essentially nothing to distribute digitally, and hardly anything to print.

People know this now, since they make their own CD copies, and many also make their own sound recordings. We all know the true cost of printing a CD is about a quarter. If the record companies charge considerably less, they will still sell CDs. I would not recommend the Radiohead model---fans knew their money would go to the band, but expect money spent at the CD store or Amazon to go to the record company. No love is lost there, certainly.

But people don't automatically take advantage of a free ride, or at least the majority doesn't. So maybe the record companies should relax about prosecutions and charge the fair price for their product. Not been tried, yet. When CDs cost a tiny fraction, to print, of what vinyl used to cost, it is insulting to pay $20 for one.

Who could have benefitted from this attack? I'm stumped on it. Given what we think we know about Musharraf, he seems more of a threat to jihadis than Bhutto.

But Musharraf has perhaps been playing a game of appearances, with close collusion with the intelligence folks in ISI. Certainly he has not delivered the big guys, Bin Laden or Zawahiri. Set against that is that he has in fact delivered a few important captures.

From a terrorist's point of view, Bhutto's convoy was a useful media-covered target. So it would be intended to show Musharraf as weak because he could not provide security for his political opponent. Along with that might be a useful suspicion about Musharraf having arranged it to serve his own needs.

I can't think he would have. But if some jihadi group pulled this off it's a huge slap in the face to Musharraf, and by extension, the "war against extremism". One gets the impression that Bush will be leaving just as things start to get really interesting.