About 40 years ago, “Weird Al” Yankovic began building his fan base the old-fashioned way: radio.

Yankovic would send tapes to disc jockey and comedy song expert Dr. Demento, who gave air time to Yankovic’s early parodies of the Knack’s then-chart-topping new-wave hit “My Sharona” (recast as “My Bologna”) and Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” (as “Another One Rides the Bus”).

Times have changed.

On-demand services have arguably supplanted radio, and Dr. Demento, whose real name is Barret Hansen, jokes that the reaction today to Yankovic is a little different than it was back in the day.

“Now, the response is ‘My God, is he still around?’?” Hansen said.

Not only is Yankovic still going strong — his most recent album, 2014’s “Mandatory Fun,” debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. pop chart — but he’s out to experiment. As the music industry transitions from album sales to streaming, Yankovic, now free of his record deal, is questioning what it means to be a veteran independent artist in 2017.

“My record contract is over, and I’m not anticipating signing a new one,” he said.

He’s at work on a major career retrospective, one that will be released under a crowd-sourcing type of model, and he says he envisions the future Yankovic to become a primarily singles-based artist.

“I’m not saying the album is a dying format or that it’s not a valid medium,” he said. “But for me it always held me back a little bit. I know that sounds a little ironic after coming off a No. 1 album. But I have to stay true to what I think is the best way for me to get my material out.”

Chief among his concerns: the shelf life for a comedy song in the age of YouTube.

“It’s been frustrating in the past to have an idea for a song, then to write it and record it, and then have it sit in the can for a year until I have 12 songs to release all at once. ... For me to be competitive at all, I think it behooves me to think more of myself as a singles artist going forward,” he said.

First, though, Yankovic, is hard at work again, this time helping Sony Legacy compile a career-spanning boxed set, titled — what else? — “Squeeze Box.”

The 15-disc collection will gather all his original studio albums, from 1983’s “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic” through “Mandatory Fun,” plus a bonus disc of rarities, a 100-page book of photos and other “Weird Al” ephemera in a replica of one of his signature accordions. The way “Squeeze Box” is being rolled out is reflective of a new era in the music business. Yankovic and Sony Legacy are promoting it through PledgeMusic, a direct-to-consumer website that functions like a crowd-funding site. PledgeMusic has begun taking orders for the set with a target release date of this fall. This ensures that production will be able to keep a close pace with consumer demand. Yankovic says the project was Legacy’s idea.

It’s now been a bit more than 40 years since the four-time Grammy Award winner from Lynwood, Calif., started seeping into the public consciousness, all thanks to an original song, “Belvedere Cruising,” which he wrote about his family’s Plymouth Belvedere, and mailed in 1976 to LA-based Dr. Demento.

Over the ensuing decades, Yankovic amassed an authoritative body of seriously silly work. Many of his songs have tweaked the overarching seriousness of the entertainment world while also demonstrating a canny grasp of what is au courant in the pop music world at any given time.

More recently he even pulled off the unlikely feat of bringing grammar and sentence structure into the forefront of pop music with “Word Crimes,” his sendup of Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’ ubiquitous “Blurred Lines.”

His brand of parody is generally considered legally safe under the First Amendment’s free speech protections and “fair use” interpretations of U.S. copyright law, but Yankovic still prefers to work with the permission of the artists whose songs he tweaks. That’s meant that he has skipped Paul McCartney, Prince and Eminem, all of whom declined to give permission when he approached them with parody ideas.

Yankovic has outlasted many of the acts he lampooned — lovingly, for the most part — including Survivor, Men Without Hats and the Police. Not bad for a novelty act — except maybe don’t use that word around him.

“It is novelty, but that’s sort of a derisive term, or at least it’s used that way a lot,” he said. “(It’s) generally considered the domain of one-hit wonders, which is something I’ve been fighting since I signed a record deal.”

randy.lewis@latimes.com