What can a band do when the record store is an antique and they’re just another name in a crowd of streaming options? Have a beer.

Music acts, especially those used to radio airplay, ample non-festival live music venues and album sales, are having a really tough time navigating the modern music industry. According to Nielsen Soundscan, overall music sales rose 3% last year behind a 75% jump in on-demand streaming.

That’s great for Spotify, Google’s GOOG, -2.37% YouTube, Apple AAPL, -3.17% , Amazon AMZN, -1.78% and Microsoft’s MSFT, -1.24% Xbox Music, among others, but not tremendous if you’re an artist used to the opportunity and revenue that albums once provided. CD sales continued to plummet, falling 16% last year, while digital albums slumped 20%. Vinyl sales jumped 10%, but make up only about 6.5% of all albums sold.

So the days of hooking fans at the record store are over. However, there’s a corner of the retail market where shoppers are still compelled, by law, to shop at brick-and-mortar locations and pick through shelves based on labels and what they’ve heard from friends.

The Lights Out’s “T.R.I.P.” album was released via Somerville, Mass.-based brewery Aeronaut Brewing Co. Erin Genett

Yep, that’s right: the beer store or beer aisle. Not surprisingly, older music acts have seen this as an opportunity. AC/DC, Kiss, Iron Maiden, Queen, Megadeth and even Rick Astley have slapped their intellectual property on beer or plan to do so in the future. It’s not just the classic rock and pop folks, either: Chance the Rapper produced a beer with Anheuser-Busch InBev’s BUD, -0.75% Goose Island, Slim Thug is working on craft beer suitable for the club, and the Deftones, Killswitch Engage, The Descendants and NOFX are making a whole lot of Ozzfest and Warped Tour attendees feel old by brewing beers of their own.

Last year, an unsigned band even released its fourth album on a beer can. The Lights Out, based out of Boston, collaborated with Somerville, Mass.-based brewery Aeronaut Brewing Co. to release their album “T.R.I.P. (The Reckonings in Pandimensionality)” with help from an “imperial session ale.” The 7.5% ABV India Pale Ale’s Galaxy came in a can marked with a hashtag that buyers would post on Twitter to receive a link to the album files.

“I know that, at some point, Budweiser and Toby Keith are going to do it, but they won’t get to say that they are the first,” says guitarist Adam Ritchie, who also runs a Boston-based public-relations firm. “We don’t have management, we do it all ourselves, we’re like a startup, and the fact that an independent band and independent brewery could turn something around like this in a matter of months with no hierarchy is just so cool.”

The Lights Out live in concert. Says guitarist Adam Ritchie: “The fact that an independent band and independent brewery could turn something around like this [an album] in a matter of months with no hierarchy is just so cool.” Ben Holmes

The Lights Out had released three albums prior to this one, but they’d seen the music industry take a few ominous turns. Music venues in Boston and elsewhere were closing, live bands were competing with smartphones for audiences’ attention and the entire way those audiences were finding, listening to and enjoying music were changing. After playing the South by Southwest festival in Austin two years ago, the band retreated and came up with a new strategy.

Drummer Jesse James Salucci, an industrial designer, fashioned a “wearable light show” out of 1,000 LED bulbs, attached it to goggles and instruments, and synced it to the band’s songs. That got the audience to point its smartphones at the band instead, but it also required a change of culture as the band’s venues shifted from barrooms to comic-book and pop-culture conventions.

“The reason it works is because we were a band for eight years before we had this show,” Ritchie says. “We didn’t start out to be this packaged act, which we’ve evolved into for great reasons, but what we’ve seen is that when we play a comic-con, the comic-con fans will then follow us to a rock club. Some of our biggest fans are from the con world.”

That fixed their live-show issues, but they still hadn’t quite figured out how to get their album into fans’ hands. Ritchie considers a new release on Spotifiy as “dragging and dropping a gallon of milk on to a grocery order online” and still relishes the memory of the incense he was burning the first time he came home from the music store with a copy of Pearl Jam’s “Vs.” album. It’s a tactile experience that’s fading and, to new generations of listeners, seems a bit redundant. That said, The Lights Out were able to connect with new fans through social media and get their album into new listeners’ hands strictly because they couldn’t avoid going to a store to pick it up.

While online-beer-delivery services like Brewpublik, Tavour, Swill and Drizly have found modest success in certain markets, state alcohol laws make it incredibly difficult to get packaged beer anywhere other than a store, restaurant or brewpub. The labeling matters, the word of mouth through friends and on Untappd, BeerAdvocate and RateBeer matters, and the physical experience of buying a beer still resonates. While releasing an album through a beer isn’t exactly going to reverse the music industry’s physical album sales and send people sprinting from streaming services, it can still serve the same niche that goes out of its way to thumb through crates of vinyl records and remembers what the store looked and smelled like each time they bought an album. The beer aisle and bottle shop are just two places where that experience is still within reach.

“What we’d like to do is follow Prohibition through history, so maybe the next album we do is released on a bag of legal marijuana,” Ritchie says.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.