although nothing to do with google, it is a big "internet" story.
by giving away his new album he's created vastly more "buzz" than if he just released it normally.

and of course, folks uploading it to the internet are now creating an even bigger buzz about the music.

see here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6900792.stm

oh by the way, the "blogger" quoted is me. i'm not going to get philip and his excellent blog into trouble so i wont direct link -but if you want the album you can get it from this blogpost:

http://linuxnotes.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-prince-album-planet-earth.html

and here's the buzz generated on google news:
http://www.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=prince+album&btnG=Search+News

as a PR coup its worked wonders. i suspect that his concerts in the uk will be sold out as a result.

The individual tracks linked to from linuxnotes are hosted at Google Pages, which is displaying a message saying "The bandwidth limit for this site has been exceeded".

I wonder what bandwidth limit you get with googlepages.com?

Roger, here's their official support article:

<< While we do have a limit set on it, we are not at liberty to disclose the amount at this time. If you exceed the bandwidth limit on your site, please know that your site will come back as soon as your site's traffic has fallen below our set amount. >>

http://pages.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=60424

Thanks, Tony. Maybe the limit even varies during the day as network conditions change. That would be a logical way to do it. No point having servers and fiber sitting idle if they can be shifting bits.

Roger, that's exactly what I thought when I read that. It could also be limited to "X" requests in a period. I guess the reason they don't want to disclose the bandwidth limit is probably because it's not really straightforward to do so.