Did Making The Album A Bit Harder To Enjoy At No Cost Make It More Exciting On Store Shelves?

The Black Keys could be at the advance guard of a movement.

No, they aren't the saviors of rock'n'roll. They aren't stirring up a spurt of blues rock duos, filthy-sounding guitars or jumpstarting a wave of Nickelback-dissing in the media. Those are well-established trends.

But the Black Keys could have demonstrated a way of amplifying album sales at a point when stumping up for music seems so last century.

In December, the Keys dropped their seventh album, "El Camino," and landed it at No. Two on the Billboard sales chart. This could appear like a minor achievement for a band fresh off of two Grammy Awards in 2011 and recent appearances on "Saturday Night Live" and "The Colbert Report." But let me refresh : It's their seventh album, and netted their highest first-week sales.

Sure, the band has continuously grown in both popularity and accessibility over the last decade. But together with the buzz, the Akron, Ohio couple selected not to make "El Camino" available upon release on the taking-the-Web-by-storm streaming services Spotify and Rhapsody.

Did making the album a bit harder to enjoy at no charge make it more interesting on store shelves? It's tough to think differently.

Services like Spotify can be a great discovery tool for music fans. I've used it to dig into unfamiliar bands for months and hope it continues to pick up steam. In December, Poster advertisement reported Spotify had racked up more than 10 million users. And now with full Facebook integration, more and more users will be digging into the library of more than 13 million tracks.

Another proponent for this method is Poster advertisement juggernaut Adele. "21" isn't available to streaming services, and not only was the best-selling album of 2011 but is in the middle of a Billboard-topping run not seen since 1998's "Titanic" soundtrack. It's been No. One for sixteen weeks, only the 20th album in history to reach that milepost.

Of course there are infinite other variables in play with the successfulness of "21," but not giving listeners the ultra-convenient luxury of streaming the album on Spotify likely is a factor.

It's worth noting that although neither "El Camino" or "21" are streamable, the biggest singles from each record are accessible on Spotify. As perhaps a way to whet fans' appetites and allow new listeners to take some notice, the Black Keys' "Lonely Boy" and Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" are out there, free. Both songs still are ranked in the top forty of Spotify's most-played songs. If the singles are getting play, interest in the full works must be aroused.

It might not benefit dynamic artists to hop out on streaming services because such access can get new music into the earbuds of the general public just as simply as radio play particularly as the quantity of rock radio stations continues to diminsh. But for mid- to top-tier acts, taking a page out of the Black Keys playbook could be a smart business call.

The whole idea looks to be obvious. In a recent issue of Rolling Stone mag, the Manager of Taylor Swift's label compared it to the film industries' approach with dramatic and rental releases. A film hits the Cineplex, then the video shop, Redbox and Netflix and eventually, many go into steady cable TV revolution.

Perhaps this is the future of the industry. Like a big-budget hit, an album might be made available for purchase in physical and digital forms on one date, and then a couple of months later get even more widely available through streaming services.

An album hitting the Web could mirror a film playing on wire. Perhaps sometime the Black Keys' "El Camino" will be to Spotify what "The Shawshank Redemption" is to TNT as reported tagza.com.