It will be art regardless. This way though, as you can see, its value has skyrocketed.
Not obviously. I'm pretty sure they could sell 5M copies at a buck apiece. Even in these dark days of record sales, they could probably make more than $5M with mass distribution.
They may make that in revenue, but actually profiting 5 mill may be bit more challenging
Not at all. Buy for $5M, release on iTunes for $10/copy, sell 715k copies (not hard, they're a big name and got AMAZING advertising dirt cheap from this stunt), give Apple the presumed 30% cut, and every copy thereafter is $7 profit. Just 1.7M copies sold is $7M profit.