Rock and Roll McDonald's

Crazy times

The last several days have been pretty amazing.

Last Tuesday we released the album for direct download on our website. On Wednesday our online distribution plan got picked up by isohunt.com and fazed.com, and we saw traffic jump noticeably. On Thursday night Cory Doctorow posted it to BoingBoing, and traffic jumped even higher. By this time we were noticing referrals from all over the world and referrers from many non-English sites.

Sunday night around midnight it made Slashdot, and Monday afternoon it made Fark -- the combined effect sent traffic through the roof. By Monday night we had recorded 32,152 downloads of the album within 24 hours, bringing our total, since Sept. 20 (when it was first released to Bittorrent) to 51,128 copies downloaded. (As of 45 minutes ago, there have been 62,269 downloads of the album, with more copies being constantly downloaded every minute -- 53 people are downloading it now as I write this.)

Consider that, during our best week in 1998 when "Flagpole Sitta" was absolutely saturating radio and MTV, that our weekly sales peaked somewhere around 27,000 copies per week. Granted, sales and downloads are far, far different things. But consider what it would take to promote and distribute 32,000 copies of a CD all over the world, in 24 hours.

Now note that not only was our cost of distribution (traditionally the most expensive and time-consuming component of getting your music to an audience) minimal, but the access cost to this globally scalable distribution network was almost zero. That's what the Internet gives us. It's an incredibly powerful resource, and to not explore alternative ways of doing things using its strengths is foolish.

With that in mind, I think I'm going to start a separate weblog (along with Erik, who has been very capably handling the nuts-and-bolts of our backend -- which, by the way, held up perfectly fine despite getting Slashdot'd and Fark'd) specifically document how our experiment is going, as it's going. One thing that's been surprising (and gratifying) is the number of people who are rooting for us to succeed with this, and the number of people that are keenly interested in our results. Whether it succeeds or fails I can't predict, but what we can do is report our progress for the world to see so that others can draw from the lessons we learn.

More details on this will be forthcoming, I'll probably have it hosted on typepad and up by the end of the weekend.

-j.

P.S. If you know what I'm talking about, check out what the bittorrent swarm looked like on Monday. Crazy!

A few notes

It's late, but I wanted to post a few comments, seeing how our album release plan made Slashdot this morning.

First, let me reiterate that we are not pretending to be the first band to do this, or be the first band to give their music away. Hundreds upon thousands of other bands already give their music away. And while we were on a major label, we are no longer (have not been for a while) -- we have paid for and are doing all the work involved ourselves.

We're not releasing things in this manner to make a big statement. Other bands (Wilco, Fiona Apple come to mind) have used these tools already to their advantage. What we're interested in is seeing if this is a viable economic model for artists, especially artists that may be where we are in our careers/lives. A different way of doing things that takes advantage of the strengths of today's technology.

Record labels will cling to and fight for old models because that's all they know (and change is always frightening). But there's no reason why artists should be limited to just that model. Part of this experiment is to see/demonstrate that doing things in this manner can work, that it is a viable option -- both artistically and economically.

It's highly unlikely that we're going to get rich off this -- and none of us are planning on quitting our day jobs -- but what this method gives us is an audience and, over the long term, the financial capitalization -- and therefore the independence -- to continue making music the way we would like to. And that's the important part. How many bands had their best work ahead of them, yet couldn't reach their audience, got caught up in the label machine, or simply couldn't get noticed by a label? I can name a few in each case, and that's only those that I know of.

I would also like to point add that this is also not some throwaway album that we slapped together in a few months for a couple hundred bucks. Production costs were a little over $30,000 and it was written over the course of a year; recording took about a month. (You indie rockers should note that we pulled in both John Goodmanson and Steve Fisk to co-produce the album -- it wasn't me in our practice space recording stuff onto my laptop.) We had it mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling. In all respects all aspects of production were exactly like what we would've done for a major/indie release -- and in fact, when we originally recorded the album that's where we thought it would end up.

(As a personal aside, woo hoo! Slashdot and Boing Boing! How cool is that? The rest of the band might not understand, but....)