This week neo-pop superstar Beck announced the release of Song Reader, a new "album" in the form of sheet music. The finished product offers nothing to listen to; just 20 sheets of notation collected in a "lavishly produced hardcover carrying case," according to the publishing outfit McSweeney's, which is working with Mr. Hansen to release this artful experiment.

People praised the project; others derided it—although not surprisingly, many musicians leaned toward the former. As the Beauty Pill's Chad Clark put it: "There is zero incentive to release music conventionally right now. It just feels dumb/masochistic. Might as well try shit. Why not?"

A solid point, and one that many of Clark's musical brethren have taken well to heart. Here are some of the more innovative ways that artists are trying to get people to pony up for music these days.

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Greg Campbell/Getty Images via Text100

When news broke that the Flaming Lips were going to play eight separate shows in 24 hours in an attempt to eclipse a Guinness World Record set by Jay-Z, the collective response was something along the lines of, "Well, of course they are."

The Lips have done so much bonkers shit up to this point in their long career—from releasing a live album on a USB drive encased in a bubblegum-flavored gummy fetus to the release of a 24-hour long song available for sale on a hard drive stuffed inside an actual human skull—that few things they do can really be seen as surprising.

But when I received a press release announcing the world record attempt and the fact that the whole thing was going to be livestreamed, I knew that this ridiculous and gimmicky thing deserved, nay begged for, a ridiculous, gimmicky response: I was going to watch the whole thing, livetweeting the whole way, and keeping notes on my thoughts and what was sure to be my mental collapse around hour 18.

What follows is culled from those notes and my tweets, and timestamped (in PT) for your entertainment and edification. You can surely find videos from the eight Lips shows and everything in between to, I guess, play along at home. I wouldn't recommend it, though. Even though it involved a band I generally admire, it was one hell of a slog.

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The PMRC is one of those faint memories that music fans that grew up in the '80s try to brush away. The Parents Music Resource Center was launched in 1985 by a group of Washington power wives—the most visible face being the wife of then-senator Al Gore, Tipper—who saw rock and rap as, in Ms. Gore's words, "a poisonous source infecting the youth of the world with messages they cannot handle."

While the PMRC's power eventually only yielded one major change—the ubiquitous black-and-white "Parental Advisory" insignia that you can still find on physical copies of albums—at the time the metal, punk, and hip-hop artists that it would have affected most made some loud and vehement statements against what they saw as potential censorship of their work. With that in mind—not to mention Mother's Day and the current pieces of proposed legislation that are threatening our access to information in the modern age—let's take a quick stroll down memory lane to take a listen to some of the best of the anti-PMRC bunch.

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