Call me crazy, but I never thought it was a good idea for them to make payment optional. If you give people a choice and tell them that it’s ok if they don’t pay, many of them won’t. Then they’ll use up the bandwidth downloading free copies. Tell them that they need to pay maybe $2 to download the album, and 100% of the downloads will be paid for. No, not everyone will buy it, some will still download it for free from P2P networks. The point is that they won’t waste the band’s bandwidth downloading free copies from them. The only downloads from their site will be paid for. Also, many people will think “It’s only $2 and it’s the proper thing to do, so why not?”

You don’t have to completely dump the traditional buyer/seller business model, just give people what they want at a good price.