The Recording Industry Association of America—that group best know these days for the intriguing strategy of suing their customers—insists that is model guarantees profitability for recording artists. Performers whose contracts with record labels include RIAA copyright protections supposedly earn money every time their music is played on the radio; radio stations (even Internet radio stations) make regular payments to cover these fees. To hear the RIAA (and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich), without RIAA protections, artists would starve as consumers enjoyed the fruits of their labor without paying a nickel for the works they have stolen.

Go tell it to the Lascivious Biddies.

This four-member girl band from New York caught the attention of podcasting pioneer and Daily Source Code podcast host Adam Curry. Since the Biddies have not signed with a major label, their music is “podsafe”—not covered by RIAA restrictions—and Curry was free to play songs like “Famous” and “Truck Song” on his show. Listeners responded not by saving the music and listening for free, but by buying the band’s CDs online at a frenetic pace. The Biddies also have begun attracting larger crowds to live performances. Their popularity has grown even more as other podcasters have picked up on them.

It all reminds me of something John Perry Barlow said several years ago as companies first began worrying about copyright issues the Web might pose. Speaking at an IABC conference in Toronto, Barlow—co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—recalled his experience as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead (Barlow wrote most of the lyrics for guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir’s tunes). The band made a decision, he recounted, to let fans (known as Deadheads) to tape concerts. The Dead, he said, was a hippie band and wasn’t in it for the money, and besides, it would be bad karma to throw a Deadhead out of a show. The result, however, was that tapers traded tapes and played them for friends, giving the band’s concert sound a broader audience. In short order, the demand for tickets prompted the Dead to move out of concert halls and into stadiums, making millionaires out of the group’s members.

Copyright law in the digital age is bound to change eventually. The antiquated thinking of the RIAA, the labels that run it, and its ilk(e.g., the MPAA) remains one of the most significant obstacles to that inevitable change. Metallica, take note: The Biddies represent the new path to success.