Washington , Mar 26 (ANI): With the music piracy market ruling the roost, rock-band REM has come up with a novel idea to release their new album on a social networking site.

This move by the popular band will enable the fans to have an access to all 11 tracks from the album Accelerate, a week before the CD hits the market in the shops on 31 March.

For listening to the songs, one must download a plug-in application called iLike which streams music over the internet for free. The iLike website will also be providing the album directly but it will require the users to pay for downloading tracks.

In an interview to Billboard.com, REM lead singer Michael Stipe said that they liked the idea when it was presented to them. He also mentioned that the way listeners find music has changed in the last 5 or 10 years.

“It was one of those ideas that was presented to us and it seemed like a good one so we ran for it. I think you can either go with it or sit back and watch it happen, BBC quoted him, as saying.

REM have become the latest band to resort to new ways of distributing music after Radiohead started the trend last year when they allowed fans to decide how much they were prepared to pay for their new album, In Rainbows. (ANI)

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