REM on the Bandwagon

Want to make Michael Stipe your Facebook buddy? Here's your chance! R.E.M.'s next album Accelerate will debut online one week ahead of its official release date — on social networking site iLike and any of the sites that use iLike's application, like Facebook. According to Billboard, the March 24 roll-out is "the first of its kind for a major act."
(If you don't count Radiohead who did something awfully similar if not exactly the same.)
Stipe says he's just going with the new wave of how listeners find music which he says "has certainly changed in the last 5 or 10 years. I think you can either go with it or sit back and watch it happen, and I would rather be out on the field than in the bleachers."

The first track has sprung a leak, "Supernatural Superserious," and it sounds like the boys from Athens can still make good music, and that's the rub, regardless the "brother can you paradigm?"