Call it a midlife crisis. Five years ago, Underworld's Karl Hyde and Rick Smith — then aged 45 and 43, respectively — took stock of their careers and realized a change was due.

"We were staying in this luxury hotel down on Sydney Harbor," Hyde recalls. "And it dawned on us that we were in a very comfortable place. And that was probably the most frightening time we'd ever had . . . Here we were: basically, our career would have been over an album, two albums down the line. That's because comfort is no place for art. You can't make good art if you're in a position of comfort."

While it would be nice to report that the dance band promptly burned their millions and moved into a squat, their response wasn't quite that extreme. Instead, they cut their ties with the mainstream music industry and set up shop online, in what might become a model for all musicians in the future — long before Radiohead's recent headline-grabbing decision to distribute their latest album online themselves.