ANGELS & AIRWAVES

Giving away music for free is only part of the plan

While the record industry busied itself suing consumers for illegally downloading music, Angels & Airwaves came up with an alternate idea: Give away the songs for free. No strings attached. That’s exactly what the band did with its third album, Love, which the group first made available for download in February.

“We felt in our heart that’s the way music is going,” singer Tom DeLonge says. “You just need to have your music be free, and then you use technology to monetize all these other areas of your business. The first priority was to push the record out to as many people as we could.”

The next step is getting fans to interact with Angels & Airwaves’ website, which will feature pay-per-view concerts, podcasts and other content. “It actually makes a lot of sense with the evolution of the music industry today, because now you can do things with technology that you could never do before,” explains DeLonge, who also fronts the recently reunited pop-punk band Blink-182.

Another part of the picture will come with a feature film the band is making. Although the music accompanies the movie, DeLonge says, “It’s not like a rock opera and you press play and watch the movie all the way through while the record plays. It’s a real film.”

With no record label looking over their shoulders, the musicians were able to write songs with the movie in mind—longer, more complex tunes freed from the strictures of the radio-friendly single. “We weren’t worried that we’d need a song that’s two minutes and 30 seconds long and the vocals come in after 10 seconds,” he continues. “So we were like, ‘Let’s just make songs that are eight minutes long.’”

The movie, also called Love, is a science-fiction story that flashes through eras from the Civil War to the near future on the International Space Station, where an abandoned astronaut watches as the Earth collapses below him. “This isn’t meant to compete with Avatar, but I think it’s going to be a very respectable art-house film,” he says.

DeLonge and his bandmates have been working on the movie for several years. It was initially planned for release around the time of Angels & Airwaves’ 2007 album, I-Empire. “It ended up being a lot better than we expected,” he says. “So we hunkered down and invested way more into it. We delayed it so we could do it right.”

–Eric R. Danton