Below is Steve Wozniak's of Legitimate Business's account of how the release of First World Problems went down.

Strategy:
After hitting a comfortable point in show crowds and online interaction with only a demo/EP and a single in a Tony Hawk game, it was time for us to make an album. Too bad selling music is hard. So lots of bands have tried a new tactic of releasing their music for free. We wanted to release our new album for free online, but we wanted to do it in a professional looking manner. I've seen it done well and done poorly. I hate when bands just go "YO CHECK IT OUT!" and post a crappy Mediafire link. No one wants to download 50-100MB of music that they don't know if they'll even like, or for that matter, anything about it. And we all know Myspace streaming quality sucks. So we wanted to do something better.

Goals:

• Launch a site where anyone could just visit and listen to a good quality version of our new album immediately, without being forced to download or wait.
  
• Enable people to download the whole album, or just certain songs, or just the liner notes. MP3 and FLAC satisfies both casual listeners and audiophile dorks.
• Bring back the old feeling of sitting along with a new CD you just bought and reading the lyric sheets alongside it.
• Include purchase links in case people did want to donate or purchase a physical copy. - Enable support for social networking.
• Keep the music at the focus - allow users to do all this without the music stopping and starting from page to page.
• Sneak analytics on the page so we could check popularity and traffic sources. 
  

Execution (techy-nerdy stuff):
I designed the whole site in Adobe Photoshop one night and just converted it to HTML/CSS. I chose JPlayer to handle audio - it chooses and uses the most efficient manner of Flash, Javascript, or HTML5, for your filetype and the user's browser, to play music in your browser. I used Jquery to fade in and fade out content - everything is still stored on the same page and fades in and out, but that means the music is NEVER interrupted. I also needed AJAX for one piece of the social networking - it lets the users easily send an email to their friends to check out the album, and it does so without refreshing the page or opening a new window. I chose 160kbps stereo MP3s for streaming and 320kbps for download. I had bandwidth to burn.

Reporting:
My hosting provides me a pretty solid piece of analytics, so I relied on that for the most part. I did go ahead and add Google Analytics a little later, but found it did not offer me anything new that was significant. So I used this to monitor download counts as well as traffic sources. I set up a Google Alert for "legitimate business first world problems", because "Legitimate Business" is a popular spam keyword. I actually coded the e-mail script to send me a duplicate copy to see if anyone used it (which as it turned out, no, not too many people did).

Stats:
I guess this is the big way to tell if this was a success or not. I attached a screenshot of the download stats for last year. But here's what I got out of it:

• We pushed just over 20,000 tracks all year.
• Our complete album was downloaded 891 times.
• Making the first track auto play accounted for most of the visits.
• The FLAC versions were downloaded pretty consistently amongst all tracks. The MP3 versions were scattered.
• About 86% of traffic were used by MP3s.
• If you don't have a VERY HIGH monthly bandwidth cap, do not do this. In October we used 84 GB of bandwidth with just over 2000 visitors, November was 32GB for around 900 visitors, and December had 900 visitors using around 28GB of bandwidth.
• Our traffic sources mainly came from: music message boards, our Facebook page and Facebook event, Myspace, Twitter, free download blogs, and podcasts.