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He wants the record industry to become a service industry, selling banking, marketing and A and R services to artists rather than controlling their careers.

And no record company schedules to conform to! If this was a major label release, they would have already talked me out of releasing it so close to Christmas when I’d be competing for column inches with Mariah Carey and Coldplay. That would have put the tour in question. As it goes, I can make the DVD available as a special treat for fans at the gigs and from my web site, and hold off on any ‘physical’ distribution until early 2007.

I even have great photos ready to go, shot by friends who came to the gigs with a decent camera. For a small and welcome fee I am sure they will allow me use of the pics on my DVD. I can’t tell you how much better I like this seat-of-the-pants way of working, compared to the ‘proper’ Music Industry way, with the meetings and budgets and egos and huge bills to recoup!

In May, President Bush signed into law a revision of the tax code that will make it easier to sell intellectual property as a stock, with profits being taxed at the same lower rate as other capital gains. "Once we have access to all the intellectual property, we're going to offer shares in individual artists and take in equity investments," McBride says. "Eventually, a major band could be its own public company." The key, he adds, sounding like an overzealous investment banker, is that the value of a band would be measured like a stock and would receive capitalization in expectation of future earnings. "At that point, even a band selling 100,000 units a year becomes profitable," McBride says.

Eventually McBride would like to pioneer another source of revenue with even greater potential: P2P networks. Earlier this year, he sparked a music industry uproar when he announced he would pay the legal defense for a Texas man being sued for piracy by the Recording Industry Association of America. "The lawsuits are hurting my bands," he says. "If you could monetize the peer-to-peer networks, everyone would make more money."

"The future of the business isn't selling records," McBride says. "It's in selling music, in every form imaginable." And by establishing a series of so-called artist-run labels, McBride is creating the next-gen music company. "We become the management company, the publishing company, and the record company rolled into one," McBride says. "We take our 20 percent cut of the whole pie."

More important, he says, the new model frees him and his artists from the overgrown bureaucracy of the music industry, and that means more money for everyone. He can book tours, sell ringtones, peddle songs to advertising agencies and, yes, give away free downloads without any of the complex, multiparty negotiations that once gummed up the works. "It used to take months to sell a frickin' ringtone to Bell Canada," McBride says. "With BNL, one phone call gets the job done."