I suspect they make money on the fact that people pay in advance and they make have better deals in place for other tracks. They themselves own a good chuck of whats on offer via The Orchard.
As predicted the new album pages are similar to what lala did, with external links to wikipedia, youtube, as well as the to "share" album pages on other social networking sites.
The change wasn't without it's problems. The fixed screen size is large and people with smaller monitors are required to do lots of horizontal scrolling. User lists are missing at the moment, they are suppose to being coming back.
Of course the automatic linking to external content is not very intelligent, so you end up with content unrelated to the band. i.e. the content for the band Earth is well about the planet...