Rock and Roll McDonald's

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....