White people love the Internet and social networking sites. And everyone loves to download music for free off of LimeWire. But how do old, white people bands make money off their product when no one is paying cash for their compact discs anymore?

Case in point: Recall R.E.M., that band that was really popular with your older siblings and had that really fast song about the end of the world as you know it. And you felt fine?

Michael Stipe hopes you remember, and in between listening to Muxtape.com and writing for Pitchfork, he would like you to check out his new awesome Internet campaign to become relevant again. And he's not alone.

In 2007, Stipe had a site where every day he posted a photo (futurepicenter.com). Ninetynights continued in this vein with video for the 90 days from January 1 to April 1. The clips were abstract at first, and collectively formed a narrative when viewed as a whole. To make the experience more temporal, a HD quality download was available for only one day, and the next day the clips were archived as streaming high quality Flash videos, encouraging remixing on YouTube.

Yikes. Most people still listening to R.E.M. still refer to that search website as "The Google"; is HD YouTube really that appealing? But you can't blame a guy for trying.

Online music distribution, and profiting from it, is a tricky thing. On the one hand, sites like MySpace make it easy for underground acts to zip their music around the world. On the other hand, Bono isn't getting any richer by having you damn kids download U2 albums off your Napsters or whatever it is.

Or he wasn't. Now, thanks his pioneering stance with iTunes, Bono earns enough in digital royalties that he can afford his second career, Obnoxious Humanitarian.

In fact, like an excited puppy on your new rug, U2 just "leaked" tracks for their upcoming album all over the Internet.

But it's not just the smug Irish!

Other bands comprised of old, white people — whose fanbases are old, white people — are figuring out the Internet in droves. They want to be the next Girl Talk, the Bansky of music, who distributed his latest Animal Farm on the web as part of a pay-what-you-want campaign.

Radiohead promoted In Rainbows similarly, letting fans to set their own price for an online copy of the album. Because the honor policy works so well on an anonymous Internet frontier.

David Byrne and Brian Eno's awesome collaboration Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is the most recent example of this, but being the misers that they are, the duo is charging $8.99 to download it. Those two probably took a cue from Trent Reznor, who's an old pro at guilting fans into buying his music online instead of illegally downloading it.

Lastly, you have to factor into the equation Michael Moore's new Tourgasm (ugh) film, which will be entirely distributed online, for the people, and brings white guy wankerism to a whole new level.

And, to bring this whole thing full circle, Michael Stipe makes a guest appearance. He was just hanging around the Internet anyway, thought he'd pop in and say "Hi."