Oh, whatever will the music business do for pirates now that it has enticed Sean Fanning to walk its plank? Maybe it will come to understand piracy as a driver of sales and marketing strategy, instead of as a reason to hire lawyers and throw away the key. Perhaps, at long last, it will recognize that there's a little bit of Napster in all of us.

Piracy has indeed been a force for innovation in distribution, sales, and marketing. Product development. too -- just look at the iPod. It's true: For any brand-builder interested in marketing and selling more stuff through keener understanding of consumer behavior, the piracy thing is about as juicy as it gets.

But sales and marketing people have, for the most part, ignored piracy's flipside potential. It's mostly been the creative types in the equation -- the artists who are, in effect, the brands -- who are looking through the other end of the spyglass.

Let's start with Prince Rogers Nelson. You know, Prince. Last summer, Prince played the piracy card by giving away a copy of his latest CD, Musicology, with every ticket sold to one of his concerts. The kicker was, he convinced SoundScan, which tracks record sales, to count the giveaways as "sold" CDs.

That sent Musicology charging up the charts, which gave Prince more radio airplay, more publicity, and more displays at retail. The result, of course, was more sales. Well, that was just a little too much success for SoundScan, which quickly announced it would not allow anybody else to do what Prince had done. Sadly, this seems to be a pattern in the music industry: If it outwits the rules, outlaw it.

What Prince did was possible because of a highly innovative record deal, under which he was paid no advance, but retained artistic control as well as ownership of his master recordings. The deal not only gave Prince the freedom to record whatever the heck he wanted and give away CDs, but also to distribute his work via his Web site, where fans could download Musicology for a low-cost, one-time fee.

"I don't really take a stance on piracy," Prince told USA Today. "If I was only getting a few pennies off every album, I'd be worried. But I get $7 a pop for every album that sells for $10. That's enough."

That would be more than enough for Wilco, the pop combo, which, incredibly, chose to pirate its own work. Having been fired by its record label over artistic differences (yet another pattern here), the band streamed its 2001 collection, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, online, for free. By the time the record was released for sale by Wilco's new label, Nonesuch Records, it was so well known and loved that it promptly hit No. 8 on the Billboard charts, which was better than any of the group's previous records had done.

"Treating your audience like thieves is absurd," Wilco's Jeff Tweedy told Wired magazine. In fact, in a remarkable display of the true colors of truly loyal consumers, some of Wilco's fans were so grateful for the free tunes that they actually asked to send some money for it -- which the band accepted and forwarded (a total of about $15K) to Doctors Without Borders, a charity.

In the same interview, Tweedy made the key point that the resolution of online music is not as high quality as the offline kind. It's a point that ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn made about four years ago, in testimony before the U.S. Senate, at the height of the Napster controversy. Hailing the Internet as "the radio of the 21st century," McGuinn implied that those who saw piracy as a threat simply hadn't considered its promotional possibilities.