OASIS has joined the growing number of bands embracing "free music", letting fans hear their new album online before its release.

The band did not actually give away the keenly awaited Dig Out Your Soul, but thousands of fans listened to it, in full and free, on the social networking website MySpace. Oasis have adopted the same marketing logic as Coldplay, who gave fans a preview of their new album on MySpace earlier this year.

Noel Gallagher, the band's main songwriter, had been scathing about the trend for bands to give away music online. He was deeply critical of Radiohead's decision last year to promote In Rainbows by a system where fans paid only as much as they wanted to download the album. But he accepted that Radiohead's move had been a clever publicity ploy. "To me it looked like marketing - a great way of getting a load of marketing for free really," he said.

Gallagher's change of heart may have much to do with dwindling CD sales and even downloads. The music industry had hoped that the growth in legal download sites, such as Apple's iTunes store, would cut illegal downloads. But the proportion of music fans regularly buying downloads has dropped from 16 per cent in 2006 to 14 per cent last year.