REM’s New Album Gets All Facebooky

Believe it or not, there's more to Facebook than becoming friends with people you never really liked and playing games of Scrabble that last for three months.

Because now Facebook is getting in on the free music revolution, by letting REM stream their new album Accelerate through Facebook application iLike a full week before it gets physically released.

The implications for this are huge - if the REM experiment works it might become normal for bands to use Facebook as pre-release tools, changing the face of music forever. Although, let's not forget that we're talking about an REM album that wasn't released in the early-to-mid nineties, so perhaps the only real implication involves millions of Facebook uses updating their status to 'underwhelmed.' 

For all the carping on about how the internet is killing the music industry, old acts that aren't very good any more have never had it so good. In the old days, once their commercial appeal had dried up, bands only had the choice of either buying a trout farm or joylessly performing to tatty backing tracks at Butlins.

But the internet has put an end to that. Now, even though they don't sell any records any more, old acts can cobble together some sort of hokey internet-based pricing system for selling albums and all of a sudden they're cutting edge again. Cliff Richard did it, The Charlatans are doing it and even Nine Inch Nails - the oldest, most pointless band around - are letting people download their self-indulgent instrumental wanks for free.

And now it's the turn of REM. For the last decade or so, REM have pretty much stuck rigidly to a set pattern of recording identical albums that nobody except for six readers of Q magazine really cares about again and again. But now it's time for REM to change and embrace the internet. The part of the internet where people still actually have to buy your records, admittedly. The Times reports:

R.E.M. have announced that they will debut their forthcoming album on the iLike internet application used on social networking site Facebook. The American band will release Accelerate as a stream available for sharing on March 24 - a week before the album hits shop shelves. They are the first major music act to debut a full album using the iLike application – a widget used widely on Facebook… [Michael Stipe said] "It was one of those ideas that was presented to us and it seemed like a good one so we ran for it."

To stream an album before its release is a brave move for REM to make, because if people hear it and decide that it's rubbish, they're just not going to buy it. So at least the band are confident that they've made a new album. Just not confident enough to release it normally without sellotaping it to a gimmicky headline-grabbing marketing strategy that involves propping it up next to something modern and popular to show how relevant REM still are.

But, still, if this is how REM wants to show that they're down with the kids, we'll happily take it - things could be so much worse. After all, we hear that second on REM's list was a concept album about High School Musical produced by Lethal Bizzle.

Of course, it's Q magazine we feel most sorry for here. Now that REM has discovered the internet, who will it put on its covers every single effing month? Eric Clapton? Say it isn't so.

Read more:

R.E.M. to debut new album on Facebook application - Times