Back in early October we inquired about the missing-in-action Slacker Player, the portable device from the free Internet radio service that’’s taking a much different approach to digital music than the iPod or Zune. Where the heck was it?

Promised for the second quarter, the Slacker Player was nearing the end of the fourth quarter with nary an appearance. But Slacker just announced the availability of the player beginning Dec. 13, just in the nick of time for the Christmas rush.

The player, which was designed by Slacker and built by Taiwanese manufacturer Inventec, features a four-inch screen for displaying album art and bio information and a touch-screen scrollbar. It can play MP3 and WMA music files downloaded separately and comes in three sizes: 2 GB ($200), 4 GB ($250), and 8 GB ($300).

What’ interesting is that Slacker, which topped one million users in October, is attempting to attract customers through a different experience than Apple and Microsoft, the ones behind the market-leading iPod and high-profile challenger Zune.

“It’s entertainment at the push of a button,” J”onathan Sasse, Slacker vice president of marketing, told InformationWeek, “r“ather than downloading separate music files and managing playlists.””

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.

So, in the end, 38 percent decided to pay for the lastest Radiohead album, “In Rainbows”, while 62 percent did not.

ComScore has provided the first definitive numbers regarding Radiohead’s decision to offer its latest album on a pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth basis. The music world is keenly watching Radiohead’s experiment to cut out the middle man and go it alone. Other bands, such as Nine Inch Nails, are planning similar defections.

During the first 29 days of October, ComScore notes, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the InRainbows site, with a “significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album.” Of those who decided not to pay for the album, 60 percent were from the United States, 64 percent from the rest of the world.

“I am surprised by the number of freeloaders,” Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures and a well-known music aficionado, told ComScore. “The stories to date about the “In Rainbows” ‘pick your price’ download offer have been much more optimistic. I paid $5 U.S. and had no reluctance whatsoever to take out my card and pay.

Many, many years ago, the local National Public Radio Station (NPR) stopped playing music when anybody was actually listening to the radio. I used to tape random chunks of music, not caring what it was, to take with me on trips because it was so good.

When the station stopped broadcasting music when I was awake, and the Internet came along, I turned to NPR’s Web site, its show All Songs Considered, and podcasts to hear interviews with musicians, listen to their music, and find artists I’d never heard before. But, alas, the old NPR site wasn’t much fun to use, especially if you’re on a Mac and don’t care much for RealPlayer or Windows Media.

NPR relaunched NPR Music, and I’m in music heaven again. The new site uses a slick Flash pop-up player that’s super-easy to use and, as an added bonus, works across all NPR properties.

Michael Geist points to a recent study conducted in Canada in part by Industry Canada (a federal agency) about music purchasing habits that includes some potentially bad news for the recording industry. According to the results of the The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada study, which surveyed over 2,000 Canadians, there is a positive correlation between file downloading over P2P networks and legit purchases of music on compact discs. This might come as a surprise to industry executives who have long complained that peer-to-peer file sharing is immensely damaging to CD sales.

According to the study’s authors, there is “a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file sharing increases CD purchases.” The study estimated that there is an increase of 0.44 CD purchases per year for every 12 P2P downloads. When viewed as a whole, the study found no positive or negative effect on CD purchasing from P2P filesharing in Canada.