It’s been a big year for free music - G.O.O.D. Fridays, Monster Mondays, and mixtapes (in addition to good old-fashioned piracy). Now, animated Brit band the Gorillaz are taking things to the next level with the free release of what they hope will be the first album created exclusively on an iPad. The group has been dropping goodies for fans on their website’s Advent Calendar for weeks, but they will debut a full-length album on Christmas day and, for the sake of credibility, not one day later. "I wanted to make sure that it came out at the end of the tour, because I don't want anyone to think I'd tampered with it," explained frontman Damon Albarn, who wrote and recorded the album during the group’s recent North American tour. "If I left it until the New Year to release it, then the cynics out there would say, 'Oh well, it's been tampered with.' But if I put it out now, they'd know that I haven't done anything because I've been on tour ever since."

Albarn gave the first scoop on the album, a follow-up to March's Plastic Beach, last month, when he told NME that he hoped to be an iPad album pioneer. The first song and video from this new iPad album will premiere on the band’s site on Christmas Eve, before the entire tracklist is made available for download the following day. No word yet on the album’s title or content, but this is solid material for a 2011 Apple iPad campaign.