What fascinates me about comedian Steve Hofstetter — other than being a funny, wickedly intelligent comic — is that he’s doing the same thing as Radiohead, Trent Reznor, and Nine Inch Nails. And yet Hofstetter is not a household name.

Like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, Hofstetter has released his latest CD, “The Dark Side of the Room,” on his Website and has asked fans to pay whatever they want — 1 cent (I wish it were free!) to $4.95 (a bargain!) to $8.95 (save a buck!) to $29.95 (big tipper!), and everything in between.

Ever since I first posted on Hofstetter for last100 in December, I’ve noticed that artists are more often releasing their work on the Internet for free or with various payment schemes. This side-stepping-the-record-label approach is all the rage — and clearly a new business model.

We know Radiohead’s story. And Reznor’s work with Saul Williams. And the recent release from Nine Inch Nails, Reznor’s band.

But there’s also singer-songwriter Jill Sobule, who asked fans to help raise $75,000 for “Jill’s Next Album” — a goal she surpassed in 53 days. Instead of asking fans to donate whatever they wanted, Sobule set up levels from $10 (unpolished rock) to $10,000 (weapons-grade plutonium). More than 500 people in 44 states and 11 countries contributed.

There’s classical violinist Tasmin Little, who released her most recent project, “The Naked Violin”, for free on her Website with a three-step challenge: listen to the music, tell her what you thought of it, and go to a concert or buy one of her other CDs. Since the music’s release in January, Little’s site has recorded more than 250,000 hits and 3 terabytes of content has been downloaded.

The list goes on.

Radiohead, Reznor, and Nine Inch Nails are star performers with household names. Sobule and Little are established artists in their own right who have released several CDs each, have had recording contracts, and who’ve built a fan base over the years.

But what about Steve Hofstetter? Can this model work for him?

DVD Jon and his company, doubleTwist, released beta software today that’s designed to allow users to share digital media files — music, video, pictures — across devices regardless of type or copy protection.

In other words, if you have a copy-protected song in your iTunes library and want to play it on a PlayStation Portable or Nokia phone instead of an iPod — or you want to send it to friends to play on the devices they own — you can do it with the doubleTwist desktop application.

The software automatically plays song files, regardless of copy protection, in the background. doubleTwist re-records the songs as MP3 files, which can then be sync’d to any device attached to a Windows computer using the doubleTwist application. (It’s not available for Apple computers yet, although a Mac version is in the works.)

doubleTwist is essentially doing the same process as when a user “rips” a CD onto a computer. doubleTwist allows only music already purchased and authorized (like iTunes) to be processed. It says 100 songs can be converted in about half an hour, with about a 5 percent degradation in sound quality.

Says doubleTwist’s Jon Lech Johansen, aka DVD Jon, “We’ve built a format agnostic solution that handles the complexity of file and device compatibility so consumers don’t have to.” (Reuters.)