I am really looking forward to hearing some new LAM! That will be fantastic. It really is a big quandary though about how to release it. It seems to me that releasing a whole album is a very big investment that most record labels would be unwilling make unless their investment is guaranteed to make profits in (as Sean said) 6 months.
I imagine this makes it really difficult for musicians that are not lumped in with top 40 garbage synth pop to fund recording.

This is really sad though because I love having a CD in my hands, flipping through booklets that come with them, and reading lyrics from actual paper. It really is the fault of the greedy consumer though. Bands get ripped off all the time even when people buy CD's. They just burn copies for their friends and pass them around.