It’s a new day. And another big name in the music industry, Madonna, is about to jump the record label ship.

Pop superstar Madonna is close to leaving her long-time label Warner Bros. Records for a reported $120 million deal with concert promoter Live Nation, Inc., The Wall Street Journal reports. Madonna is to receive a mix of cash and stocks in exchange for three studio albums, the right to promote her concerts, to sell her merchandise, and to license her name.

Madonna, however, still owes Warner Bros., whom she has recorded with from the start of her career in 1983, one studio album and a greatest hits package.

Madonna’s pending move is another sign of how quickly the music industry is changing, although Madonna’s move is different from announcements made recently by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

First Radiohead. Now Nine Inch Nails.

Trent Reznor, the artist behind Nine Inch Nails, has informed the music world that his band is “totally a free agent, free of any recording contract with any label.” “I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different,” Reznor said.

NIN is now the second mega-band in the past 10 days to announce itself label free. Unlike Radiohead, which said its new album will be available from its Website for whatever you want to pay, Reznor did not elaborate on NIN’s plans. “Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008,” he said. “Exciting times. Indeed.”

There’s been a lot of activity lately in the portable music player market. Just yesterday Microsoft unveiled its second generation Zune. And market leader Apple refreshed its entire line of iPods last month. One anticipated player, however, is still missing in action: the Slacker Player.

Slacker, the free Internet radio service, said the boringly-named Slacker Player would be available in the second quarter of 2007. It’s now the start of the 4Q. We know Slacker is busy, but even so we are anxious to see if Slacker, its Player, and Internet-radio-on-the go are, indeed, a compelling alternative to the Zune and iPod.

Instead of purchasing songs from online stores such as the Zune Marketplace or the iTunes Music Store (or ripping your own music into MP3s), users who purchase the Slacker Player will be able to transfer their “personalized stations” and music to the portable player via Wi-Fi. They set up their “personalized stations” using the Slacker Desktop Radio accessed from a browser.

Microsoft unveiled three new second-generation Zune models late Tuesday and announced that its online music store, Marketplace, will offer consumers 1 million DRM-free songs for purchase.

As nice as it is to have second generation Zune players, it looks like Microsoft is matching Apple’s iPod both in features (hard drive-based and flash-based players) and price points.

The hard-drive based Zune 80 sports, naturally, 80 GB of storage. It uses the new Zune Pad, a four-way touch sensitive d-pad for up, down, left, and right functions. Its screen size is marginally larger, 3.2 inches from 3.0, and it’s about 1/3 smaller than the original Zune, which is now known as the Zune 30. The Zune 80 will sell for $250 and will be available sometime in November.

Also of interest are Microsoft’s first flash-based models, the $200 Zune 8 and the $150 Zune 4, which store 8 GB and 4 GB respectively. They, too, use the Zune Pad and will feature a 1.8-inch display (compared with the iPod Nano’s 2-inch screen). They will be available in red, pink, black, and green colors.

Thom Yorke, one of the artists behind the band Radiohead, hinted in 2003 that this day would come. Well, it’s here. Radiohead is releasing its seventh studio album, In Rainbows, completely on its own with no label and a pay-what-you-want price tag.

“I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one,” Yorke told Time after Radiohead’s contract with EMI/Capitol expired after its release of Hail to the Thief in 2003. “And, yes, it probably would give us perverse pleasure to say ‘f*** you’ to this decaying business model.”

The long-established business model is not dead yet, but Radiohead’s bypassing the record labels is another brick out of the music industry’s wall. Radiohead is still one of the biggest bands in the world, selling millions of albums and selling out concerts around the globe. Everybody — from artists to the record labels to the music industry as a whole — will be keenly following the success, or failure, of In Rainbows because it represents a new and potentially powerful way to sell music.