Emerging artist and producer Mr. Ozwald thinks he may have found a solution to the music industry’s inability to sell albums the past few years — he gives songs away for free.His newest album, “The Yearbook,” is comprised of 12 singles released over a 12-month period. He wrote, produced and released a new track each month for one year and allowed users to immediately download them for free from his Web site.The self-proclaimed “neo hip-hop” artist combines elements of hip-hop, rap, pop and funk with electro undertones. His music has been featured on MTV’s “Rob & Big” and “Run’s House,” ESPN and ABC, and he has performed alongside artists like Lil Wayne and Ghostface Killah.Mr. Ozwald said he got the idea to release 12 singles instead of a conventional album after visiting the iTunes online store and noticing the majority of people only buy one or two songs off each album.”Now that you can buy songs individually, people are just going after the ones they want,” he said. “It’s a singles-driven market.”Based on Nielsen’s 2008 year-end figures, Mr. Ozwald is right.Single-track downloads outsold albums by a ratio of 2.5 to 1 last year. A record total of 1.07 billion songs were downloaded in 2008, up more than 80 percent versus 2007.”I don’t really think the majors have figured things out yet,” Mr. Ozwald said. “I wonder if they are paying any attention to what’s going on. The things they are doing are archaic.”He said he thinks some indie labels have started to spend more time and money on the digital, singles-driven market, but the major labels are still spending huge budgets recording whole albums despite suffering album sales.According to Nielsen, total album sales dropped 14 percent in 2008 and have fallen 45 percent since 2000. Even if album sales are combined with track sales using a formula that counts 10 track downloads as one album sale, the total is still down 8.5 percent from 2007 and more than 30 percent below 2000.”The music business is in a state where people will spend three or four dollars on a ring tone but won’t spend a dollar to download a song,” Mr. Ozwald said.Mr. Ozwald is not the first   artist to give music away to generate buzz.He based his free-single idea partly on the marketing model used by many well-known electronic DJs who give songs away on their blogs or Web sites to spread the buzz and sell tickets to their shows.Many hip-hop artists release mixtapes of freestyles and collaborations to create hype for future album releases and concerts.Music digitization has also made its way into the alternative genre.British alternative rock band Radiohead’s seventh studio album, “In Rainbows,” was released as a digital download in October 2007. Customers could order the album for whatever price they saw fit. A physical album release followed in December, selling 3 million copies worldwide in both digital and physical formats.Trent Reznor, frontman of rock group Nine Inch Nails, released a 36-track instrumental album over the Internet last March. The album, “Ghosts I-IV” was available in a varying range of price packages. Reznor gave away the first nine songs of the album for free and sold the entire digital album for $5. The album was nominated for two Grammys in the categories Best Rock Instrumental Performance and Best Box Set or Limited Edition Package.Mr. Ozwald said artists who give songs away for free use the buzz to make money through performing, advertising, ring tones and sponsorship.Despite releasing 12 singles, Mr. Ozwald said he feels his album still has appeal as a complete album. “I didn’t have time to really overthink things,” Mr. Ozwald said. “Music is a vibe. If you spend too much time working on something, you might kind of lose that vibe.”If listeners play the completed album all the way through, he thinks they will be more involved because each song sounds different from the one before it, and the album doesn’t have the same feel the whole way through.”If people aren’t going to pay for music, then you might as well have them promoting your stuff anyway,” Mr. Ozwald. “I don’t want those people to not have my music.”—-Contact Jack LeBlanc at [email protected]