Metallica take a leaf out of Phish's and Pearl Jam's book and start selling their gigs online in MP3 ($9.99) or FLAC ($12.99) (including PDFs of CD labels, jewel cases and insets). The more bands that do this the better.
Universal digitises a massive chunk of their catalog [The Register]and set up a backend to allow digital music stores to buy ISOs of CDs to redigitise into their shops format for selling.
... digital distribution isn't just about serving up the hits, it's about commercialising record companies' back catalogues for songs and albums that may not be cost-effective to offer in physical form nevertheless have a small audience who will pay for downloads. The Register would never advocate the use of P2P file-sharing services as a source of such material, but it's hard to see where else folk can get digital copies of many of their old LPs from. Some will never become available, thanks to changing rights ownerships, but plenty of others lie mouldering in record labels' vaults, uncommercialised. That, surely, is half the point of an online archive - it allows the sale of material that it might otherwise be impossible to sell.UMI admitted that the current catalogue isn't as large as its collection of physical masters. "it's not absolutely everything we have as our inactive, 'deep' catalogue includes all the deletions, outtakes and unreleased material our labels have in their vaults, including a small proportion of stuff which was released once but for which there genuinely is little or no current demand," said the spokesman. "It's a matter for the repertoire owners - the artists and labels - whether this material ever sees the light of day, but Universal is actively working with all parties to make this repertoire available online wherever possible."