There is currently a revolution taking place in the music industry. It is common knowledge that music distribution has changed forever with the rise in prominence of digital downloads and the success of portable media players. The media has recently been full of speculation that the record label as we know it will soon disappear. This may or may not happen one day, but the change in the industry certainly isn’t just a recent development. High-profile recording artists have embraced the Internet as a creative and promotional tool since the mid-1990s and more recently have utilised the net as a medium for selling and distributing music independently. Listed below are just a handful of those pioneers. [Please add your own digital pioneers in the comments.]

Aerosmith

Aerosmith have had a long, interesting and varied career, spanning four decades and fourteen studio albums. However, it is a little known fact that Aerosmith offered the first full-length commercial download back in 1994. The track was called “Head First”, recorded initially for the “Get A Grip” album but was later rejected. Geffen Records and Compuserve teamed up to offer the download over their lighting-fast 56kbps connections. The track later appeared as a B-side, but internet history had already been made.

Earlier this week the Web was abuzz that Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want experiment with its latest album, “In Rainbows”, drew a surprising number of freeloaders. But wait!

Radiohead claims that comScore, the Internet company which provided the initial numbers, is “totally inaccurate.” Radiohead said in a statement (via matthewingram.com):

“In response to purely speculative figures announced in the press regarding the number of downloads and the price paid for the album, the group’s representatives should like to remind people that . . . it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales.

“However, they [the band] can confirm that the figures quoted by the company comScore, Inc., are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”

One of the early criticisms of the Zune, Microsoft’s digital media player, was that it didn’t support podcasts. That all changed with the release of Zune 2. Now, Microsoft is taking it a step further with the introduction of the Zune Marketplace Podcast directory.

Which isn’t a bad idea. If you’re a podcaster looking to get the word out about your show — and you don’t want to be buried amongst the thousands of shows and personalities in iTunes and other podcast directories — then the Zune Marketplace Podcast directory is for you.

Rob Greenlee, the Zune Podcast Programming Manager, said the directory will launch next week with just a 1,000 feeds in its directory, making it nice and clean compared with other listings.

I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with readers and friends over digital rights management, or DRM. Yes, we all agree, it’s evil. And someday, the Evil DRM Empire will be overthrown and freedom will reign.

That day, however, has not arrived. But Ben Drury of the British music download service 7Digital says that selling DRM-free music is working so well for the company that he believes DRM will be overthrown next year.

“By next summer all four major labels will have removed DRM from MP3s,” Drury told The Register.