Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, Folk Festival headliner, shows how it's changing

He likens today's more singles-oriented music business to the 1960s. "I think it's a good thing for a band to have to work on each song to try and make it pretty exciting. Album tracks are becoming kind of quaint. Though that maybe doesn't bode so well for Wilco, because I think everything we've ever done is an album track."

The changing industry "for a lot of reasons has benefited us. One of the reasons for that is we've really embraced it." As far back as 2001, in the midst of the brouhaha over the band being dropped from Warner Bros. and signing with Nonesuch (a drama documented in Sam Jones' 2002 film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart), Wilco made its celebrated album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot available as a free stream over the Internet.

"It's been good for us, but I wouldn't know what to do if we were just starting out," says Tweedy. Wilco has just begun work on a new album, likely to be released sometime in 2011.

With the band's Nonesuch contract Tweedy recently told Billboard that it's unlikely the album will come out "under the umbrella of a major label. . . . It doesn't make sense for us to pay somebody three-quarters of the pie for a lot of things that we've been doing ourselves."

As yet, Tweedy has no clear idea what direction the next album is headed in. "We're taking advantage of the fact that we have our own studio and can loll around and make [stuff] up and not have to worry about breaking the bank," he says. "We're having fun and making music. . . . It's just what we love to do."

It's unlikely then, that Tweedy will unveil any new material when he plays the Folk Festival.

"I don't think so," says the songwriter. "It depends on how I'm feeling when I get there, and what the environment's like. It's not out of the question."

Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "In the Mix," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/inthemix/