The Times 'does a Mail on Sunday', gives away REM album, saves environment

Familiar as you may be with The Mail On Sunday's tendency to give away a covermount compilation CD by a charting pop band every week, you'll be delighted to know The Times have now joined in on this practice, giving away some of REM's new live record, as well as a selection of their hits past and present.

The Mail's style was to stick a physical copy in a card wallet with every edition but, what with the world falling apart from the North Pole down, The Times have gone for a rather new-fanlged and more environmentally-friendly approach in giving people who purchase the paper a unique download code to get ten songs from iTunes.

This is also a positive, of course, because it saves clutter - my parents have about 58 of these horrid things knocking around, including, I think, the one from 2001 where Chris De Burgh sings the songs of Journey in the style of Nat King Cole.

To download the songs from iTunes, you'll need to use your card code from the Times' magazine on Saturday. The first five tracks are from their unreleased live album, Live At The Olympia, which was recorded during five nights of "working rehearsals" in Dublin. From these sessions some of the material which appears on Accelerate was born. You'll be able to hear the protogenic versions of those songs before the album's release, as well as the other end of the scale - REM songs which have been played literally millions of times, like 'Losing My Religion' and 'Man On The Moon'.

Visit The Times to get if you want to partake in this whole process. I think it's REM week or something over there, too.