Rock and Roll McDonald's

Here we go

No turning back now. Phase 1 is up and running, the album is now being seeded out to Bittorrent as we speak. We'll see how this all turns out. Next week we put the album up for download off our servers.

Hey, if you're reading this and you haven't taken a listen to the new album, why don't you give it a spin?

Little by Little ... on the DL

Note: This is the text of a statement that will be posted to the band site later today. -- j.

Why we're releasing our latest album for free on the Internet

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at http://www.harveydanger.com. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Of course, the CD will also be for sale on the site, as well as in fine independent record stores across the country, in a deluxe package that includes a 30-minute bonus disc that serves as a companion piece to the record proper (retail price for the package is $11.99).

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record.

However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign, along with radio and press promotion, live shows, and videos. It’s a bet that the resources of the Internet can make possible a new way for musicians to find their audience – and forge a meaningful artistic career built on support from cooperative, not adversarial, relationships.

We realize that digital files are the primary means by which a huge segment of the population is exposed to new music; we also believe that plenty of music lovers in the world will buy a record once they’ve heard it – whether via radio or computer.

We also believe there’s an inherent qualitative difference at work—not only between MP3s and CDs, but between clicking a mouse and finding a record on the shelves of a good record store. These experiences are not mutually exclusive – they’re interdependent facets of music fandom, and equally important considerations for a band in our position.

Even with the proliferation of websites and magazines paying attention to independent music these days, it remains difficult for bands—especially rock bands—to get exposure, regardless of how good they may be (or how successful they once were). Making the record freely downloadable removes the main barrier that exists between an artist and the world of potential listeners. And we do mean world; the web’s reach is everywhere.

Whether or not people will buy something they can get for free is obviously a big question, and there are facts and figures to support both sides of the argument. We think it’s not only possible, but likely. The more fundamental challenge is ensuring people have access to your work to begin with.

At the risk of sounding Pollyanna-ish, making records has never been about making money for this band. If the worst thing that happens is a whole bunch of people hear the album and no one buys it, we’ll know our experiment was costly. But that won’t make it a failure.

This is by no means a manifesto. We don’t pretend to be the first band to spin a variation of the shareware distribution model. We love record labels and record stores. We buy lots of CDs and are committed to supporting independent music. We’re not a bunch of fake Marxists. We’re just trying to be smart capitalists so we can sustain our lives as musicians. This is an experiment. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the record. Everything else is secondary.

Inching ever closer

So here's the plan, and the timetable:

Sept. 13 -- Album (deluxe double-CD edition) released in stores
Sept. 20 -- Electronic version of the album seeded to Bittorrent
Sept. 27 -- Electronic version of album available for download from harveydanger.com

Of course, one of the good things about doing everything yourself is that you can change the dates if need be, but at this point it's highly highly unlikely that those dates are going to change.

Hopefully each event gives us a bit more data to help us prepare for the next event; Erik is working hard on preparations to make sure we don't get hosed if everyone tries to download the album at the same time. That's the nightmare scenario: everyone's trying to get it, ensuring that nobody can get it. Walking into the online release date blind, with no idea who/how many people are going to want it, seems needlessly foolish.

I'm hoping the early start for bittorrent will alleviate some of the load on our download servers; as further incentive we're considering encoding at a higher bitrate (192 vs. 160kbps) for the BT distribution. We'll also likely release it in both MP3 and OGG formats.

Of course, the album sounds great even at 160 Kbps encoding. All you purists, of course, will have to purchase the CD for the "uncompressed" version. All you real purists, of course, will have to contact me for the 24-bit true resolution master. :)

At some point I intend to write up the reasoning behind why we're doing things the way we're going to -- hopefully I can get on top of this huge to-do list and start working on it -- if only to answer the questions that keep popping up.

Five years later...

Working right now on setting up the new band site and doing the big switch-over. Anthony has done a great job, especially given the little time that we've given him. The entire site is being built with Moveable Type, which is a pretty interesting experience. Had to work around some minor stuff but the overall result is pretty pleasing. Hopefully it'll be easy for the rest of the guys to add stuff through the MT interface; we'll see.

This will be the first major overhaul of the site since, oh, mid-2000. At some point it became a running joke with myself to see how long I could leave it up un-updated. As recently as last November, the last "Recent News" item was for something in July of 2001, I think, and some of the areas never got built anyway. We're going to roll out the rest of the sections on the site as we finish them; right now the release date of the album is so close we need to get this stuff up as soon as we can. We're going from playing no shows in all of 2005 to almost a show or appearance every other week for August through October.

Sigh. Never enough time for everything.

I'm afraid that a lot of people are going to misunderstand the way we're releasing the album and the reasons we're doing it (more on that to come). It's part of the reason I set up one of these things in the first place, to have some place to explain at more length to those who might be interested, in a non-band context. That is, if I can find the time to do it....

$11.90 per post

Okay, two posts in four months is just plain stupid. At this rate it's going to cost me $17.90 per post. Screw that.

Anyway, a barrage of announcements (long in the making) on the band front is on its way. Look for the announcement on the band website in the next couple days or so. Word of our plans has been slowly leaking out, so we need to make our "official" announcement soon. It'll nice to have it out, anyway, so I can start discussing it...if you're puzzled you'll find out soon enough.

On a related note, things are piling up and I feel like I'm working more and more, sleeping less and less, and somehow falling further and further behind. Time to hunker down and get back into "work all the time" mode. I've resigned myself to the fact that I have to suspend my effort to cut back on Red Bull and other energy drinks, at least for the next few months (I think "resigned" is probably the wrong word, it's actually more like "eagerly rationalized"). I've discovered the Starbucks doubleshot canned espresso drink (tastes like coffee ice cream!) and somehow I've deluded myself into thinking it's better for me, since there's just less of it. I've bought an Aerobed and intend to keep that, along with a change of clothes, in the trunk of my car. I hope it's not going to come to that, but if it does, I'd like to be prepared....

Second Post

In lieu of any actual real content, I submit a link to Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford University. Short and well worth a listen:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/videos/53.html

(downloadable links here):

http://www.wiredatom.com/jobs_stanford_speech/

It's true, only the second post in and I'm starting to regurgitate links! I am lost!

It's very easy to listen to these kinds of "go forth and LIVE" exortations, and get inspired to intend to live this way. But it's another thing entirely to get up the next morning, commit to it and grind it out, especially if the rest of society (including your family, friends, coworkers, et al) thinks you should be doing this instead, or that instead. And then when you wonder at night: "Maybe they're right -- what if I totally screwed it up?"

A speech like this serves not just those starting out into the world, but is useful to those that might need to re-examine whether we're still living our lives the way we intended to.

Introduction

Many years ago (it's frightening exactly how many years ago), I attempted to write a weekly column for the student newspaper at the University of Washington, where I was attending school.

How hard could it be, I wondered, to write a few hundred words each week? As it turned out, it was excruciatingly painful. In the world of writers, there are speeders and there are bleeders. I'm a bleeder who's low two pints -- I only attempted the column for one academic quarter; in a ten-week period I missed some three or four columns. Of the ones written, only two or three were worth reading. The problem, I discovered, is that once your initial pool of ideas is exhausted, you have to find something new, something interesting, some novel angle. After a handful of columns, I ran dry, and was unable to come up with original views or delude myself into thinking that I did. That experience made me leery of having a blog since I didn't want to end up in either of the ruts many weblog authors fall into: regurgitating what everyone else is saying and linking to, or documenting the minutiae of their daily existence.

For the past two years I've kept a LiveJournal account. However, I've kept all the entries limited to people on my "friends" list. For me, this was basically a half-assed way of keeping a blog (but an easy way of keeping up with some friends with minimal effort). The problem is that because you already know everyone (and everyone knows you), whatever you say is inherently interesting. If I go to a coffeeshop and spill my mocha all over myself, that's interesting because the audience cares in some way. If my writing is sub-par, it doesn't matter (standards are certainly lower), and I can fill space with "taffy is good" posts, the latest quiz-of-the-week saying what color M&M I am, and the fact that they burned my pizza at lunch. Who cares? My friends will keep reading -- maybe not as closely, but they'll keep up because I'm terrible at staying in touch and it's an easy way to see what I've been doing.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work quite as well in a public arena; there may be some of you who have arrived here because you know me in various contexts (probably, in this order: as a member of a certain rock band, as a UW CSE student, as a friend, a friend of a friend, maybe as family) and are curious. Eventually, whether or not you spend your attention here is going to be based on your answer to one question: "Does he have anything to say that's worth hearing?" (on the other hand, if you want to know what color M&M I would be, friend me on my LiveJournal account -- if you can figure out my id).

The downside to a private/limited readership, though, is that you miss out on the greatest part of this medium: the dialogue, the interactions that I see in others' public blogs/journals, and the community that follows between people that have never actually met each other. Interesting, thought-provoking discussions that would likely never take place in the physical world; certainly not as easily and from as wide a range of informed people. Missing out on that is missing out on a big piece of the best of what this new medium has to offer. And that is what I hope to get, in some way, from this -- as well as a place where I can dust off the writing chops.

If you've made it this far, welcome! I hope you stick around. Taffy is good.