[travisbrown]

Well, they still need to recoup production costs. If you spend a million making a record (which Lyle's last production could conceivably have easily cost end-to-end) , you would at least want to break even on sales if you want to use albums as a sustainable promotional tool. It would be the difference between a recovery business model and a something like a capitalization project.

Since most albums that size are funded by record company advances, it's a pretty good chance they'll want their money back sometime.

The only people who are proponents of just giving albums away free are usually not the ones paying for it.