Okay, this is how I think it’s going to go down: before the end of the year, a major player in the music industry will announce that it’ll no longer sign bands to make albums. It’ll institute ten-song deals versus three albums, the product to be delivered over a two-year period versus a contract tying up five to ten years. Each of the ten songs are to be considered singles, radio-ready, with at least a 65 percent probability of hit status, otherwise the band in question is liable to be dropped for fulfillment issues. If the losses are great, breach-of-contract litigation is not out of the question.

Sound ridiculous? Or does it sound like the obvious conclusion for an industry that continues to lose money and customer patronage, seeking to cut away anything that doesn’t promote profit — album tracks that may appeal to a creative sense but can’t be capitalized upon, extra production costs inherent in those tracks, and design, packaging, and promotion of a product the public only wants 10 percent of. Witness the next music-industry model circa 2010: the business model of 1961. A label executive now sees his competition focused solely on bankrolling hits, not album sides or expensive packaging, and has to mull over whether it’s better business-wise to chop his staff in half or chop his label’s output in half, retaining the profitable side for himself. Of course the second option is better. He follows suit, and the business model we know today ceases to exist.

Now, you as a music fan and album purchaser hear this news and are appalled — what about the creative angle, the cohesive whole, and the notion that an artist has the broadest canvas with which to work, expand, and grow? Well, what about it. It was recently reported that Apple’s iTunes is now the dominant provider of music in the world, bigger than electronics stores that stock CDs as loss leaders, bigger than even monolithic Wal-Mart, which itself was once the king of music retail. iTunes has made its bones on singles, pure and simple. Few of the portal’s primary users actually go for album sides; people with that mind-set are still likely to buy the physical product, but their numbers are dwindling fast. To say the public in general will miss the album is to ignore the obvious — not only won’t they miss it, they haven’t missed it for five-plus years and counting.

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They said it would never be done. I said it would never be done. Geffen/Interscope/ Universal prayed that it might, but Axl Rose kept them at bay for more than a decade (much more!). This morning, however, a miracle happened.

Following in the footsteps of Saints Yorke and Reznor, Rose released Chinese Democracy to an unsuspecting public. Rumored tracks have been leaking onto the torrent sites for well over five years, and several are found on the album (available only as a download for the time being); “Better,” “I.R.S.,” and “There Was a Time” are the most notable, as all have made their way into GNR concerts since 2002. These songs as well as “You Didn’t Hear From Me,” an epic ten-minute track feeling very much like “November Rain, Part 2,” are strangely well produced. I say strangely because, in what may be the boldest move of all, the sonic detail even in MP3 form is stunning. Rejecting the loud and hot model of the most recent hard-rock releases, Rose and his phalanx of producers over the past 13 years have made something that even the most hardened of loud-rock haters will begrudgingly admire. The mix is just that spectacular.

Of course, Rose has never been known as the most altruistic fellow, so don’t expect this to cost $5 or less or even “whatever you want to pay” like Radiohead did with In Rainbows last fall. It’s $9 for the basic version and $14 for a version with an art PDF, but trust me, you’re actually getting your money’s worth this time, if only to hear some punchy, raucous rock the way it used to be, with glistening highs, thunderous lows, and every note in between.

Geffen is proposing shutting down Guns n’ Roses’ official download portal because first-release rights were contracted to them, so grab it fast before it’s too late, or worse, Rose decides to yank it himself and put it on hold for another ten years. The official Chinese Democracy download portal can be found here.