Weird Al To Release Songs As He Records Them

slapout writes "Weird Al has announced that with the Internet he can now release his songs for sale as he records each one rather than waiting for a whole album to be produced."

Comments

Just because he can...

[monktus]

...doesn't mean that he should.

Re:Just because he can...

[electrictroy]

Yes it does mean he should. Through his actions he can demonstrate that an artist doesn't need the corporate engine in order to succeed. He can use the internet to eliminate the waste of the middle man.

Re:Just because he can...

[MyLongNickName]

TRIVIA - In both 1988 and 2008 it took 1 hour to download a game. Internet speeds have kept pace with growing demand.

94% of all internet facts are made up on the spot.

Re:Just because he can...

[Mordaximus]

Much like Trent Reznor and Radiohead, he's got tons of cash to play around with and experiment - cash made while riding the corporate engine. I'll subscribe to your theory when I see a brand new artist do the same thing and make a profit from it.

Re:Just because he can...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, like Jonathan Coulton?

Who?

Re:Just because he can...

[electrictroy]

>>>94% of all internet facts are made up on the spot.

Except this one is verifiable:
1988 - download of 880k floppy game over then-typical 2400 baud modem =~ 1 hour (from my own personal experience)
2008 - download of 4000 megabyte game over typical 10 Mbit/s cable =~ 1 hour (math)

Naturally the actual time will vary if your 1988 computer had a double-sized floppy (takes 2 hours) or if you are downloading a dual-sided DVD (also 2 hours). But Slashdot's signature length limit precludes me from including all that detail. The important point to note is that speeds have escalated to match demand. We have never experienced the so-called "speed limit" that certain Chicken Littles keep claiming we're going to hit. They are just blowing a lot of hot air, and have been doing so for almost 15 years now. Their claims have no merit.

Re:Just because he can...

[MyLongNickName]

I guess my bigger issue is your definition of game size. I know that sizes vary wildly. In the 80's, I had some games that fit on one floppy, and others that spanned at least 4, and you had to swap as you made it to other parts of the game. The same is true today.

However, if you argument is that we don't have an imminent bandwidth crisis, I will agree. However, we do need to invest in more infrastructure. With a soon-to-be $11 Trillion dollar debt in the U.S., I sincerely worry that our infrastructure will not be a priority (and probably hasn't been a priority for some time).

Re:Just because he can...

[EaglemanBSA]

How about Imogen Heap? Last I knew, she did her own producing.

Re:Just because he can...

[gottebag]

who?

Re:Just because he can...

[El Yanqui]

I think this form of distribution benefits Weird Al far more most other artists. While many nerds here believe he has created music for the ages, his songs work best when they're topical. Amish Paradise is funniest when it is held in comparison to Gangsta's Paradise. Same goes for Eat It and all of his parodies. To appreciate a parody you need to know the original.

This way of distributing his songs allows him to seize on any momentary pop culture phenomenon and have the general public, those who don't read /. or go to math camp, buy them.

Re:Just because he can...

[Jaysyn]

Fugazi (& they were doing it 15 years ago), MC Chris, Silversun Pickups, Death Cab for Cutie (until recently), The Decemberists, The Shins, NIRVANA, The Postal Service, Rehab (again until recently), Arcade Fire...

There are quite a few acts that have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Just because you haven't heard of them or you don't like the genre, doesn't mean they don't exist.

Re:Just because he can...

[electrictroy]

>>>if he just picks two sizes that work out mathematically

We're talking about a *general* concept, not precision. Even if we assume somebody's downloading the 4-floppy Space Ace game to their Commodore Amiga PC, which would require 4 hours at then-common 2400 baud rates, it's still close to how long a game download takes today. It's within an order of magnitude.

This is in direct opposition to what many experts were saying in 1995. They claimed the internet had reached a natural speed-limit of 33k, and would not go any faster. Obviously they were wrong, but if their predictions had been accurate, then downloading a modern DVD game would require 270 hours (almost 12 days)!!!

Clearly the so-called experts of 1995 were wrong.
And I think Comcast's current prognostications of
"running out of internet" are equally wrong. It's just a bunch of FUD.

Probably will be great for him

[sokoban]

I guess now by doing this he can have a parody in the hands of his fans while the original version of the song is still popular. If you're trying to lampoon popular culture, releasing an album at a time means that you will always be a good deal behind the times.

Re:Probably will be great for him

[DynaSoar]

I guess now by doing this he can have a parody in the hands of his fans while the original version of the song is still popular. If you're trying to lampoon popular culture, releasing an album at a time means that you will always be a good deal behind the times.

That's not as good an idea as you might imagine. I do the same thing -- parody songs. Popular != well known. Older means more people have become familiar with it, particularly those who don't keep current on the genre the song is from. If fewer people recognize it, the act falls flat. I'll bet Weird Al is aware of this since he typically runs years behind a "hit" despite producing things in the interim. Plus, if he seeks permission (he used to sometimes) it'd be easier to get when something's no longer hot. Very new, and they won't want it made fun of. Older, and the parody can bring the original back up the chart.

Re:Probably will be great for him

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Plus, if he seeks permission (he used to sometimes) it'd be easier to get when something's no longer hot. Very new, and they won't want it made fun of. Older, and the parody can bring the original back up the chart.

That's an interesting point, but he isn't going to run out of available material to parody any time soon. And as far as I'm aware, he always asks permission from the artist before doing a parody of their song, even though legally he doesn't have to. I've always respected that about his work.

Oh Good

[TornCityVenz]

Oh what a relief...

Re:Oh Good

[gsslay]

I detect a touch of cynicism in your post.

Do you not realise that this means that fans of food-based "parody" songs can get their hands on Weird Al's output while it's still lame, rather than waiting until it's lame and outdated? This could revolutionise Western culture as we know it.

Only one question remains; how the hell is this news?

"physical media" on the way out?

[Chrisq]

If this catches on by the time albums are released most fans will already have all the tracks they want on their iPhones, mp3 players, etc.

It might not be too long before the physical album is like the TV series collectors sets - you only get them if you want the nice boxes and "official" stamp.

Re: "physical media" on the way out?

[VincenzoRomano]

MP3 players ARE the physical media!

Re: "physical media" on the way out?

[Max Romantschuk]

I think my kids (2 and 4 now) will find the whole notion of physical media for consumable media ridiculous.

Once (hopeful here) this silly DRM thing is over and prices are low enough for piracy to be less attractive physical media will simply become impractical.

Sure, there will always be the collectors who keep stuff for whatever reason, but most people are only after the music/video/whatever...

Re: "physical media" on the way out?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid you are completely missing what is happening to the music industry.

DRM was never about catching piracy, it was about extracting more money from those who legally pay for their media. Fortunately, DRM appears to be dying a death but the media companies still want to make more profits from those people who do pay for the stuff.

The fact is that downloadable music, legal or illegal, is turning music into a disposable commodity - i.e. once your iPod fills up, wipe it and start again. And because of that, there will no longer be the *need* to make albums that people are likely to listen to for their entire lives.

Look at modern pop music and you will see endless clone artists, no matter what the genre, that are thrown into the limelight for eighteen months or so just to churn out cheap-to-make music - as soon as these same artists get beligerent and demand more money, they disappear, with a new cheaper "clone" put in place.

For the record labels its great - no arrogant mega-stars to deal with, just churn out plastic dross that's cheap to make but makes loads of profits. This is why a lot of youngsters these days have a perception that albums only have one or two good tracks on them - because that is actually the case for the trash that's forced on them by advertising.

So I actually feel sorry for your kids - because when they get to an age where they can start to appreciate music, there will be no "classic" albums that will come out of their generation, just "pick 'n' mix" music.

Re: "physical media" on the way out?

[mcgrew]

And because of that, there will no longer be the *need* to make albums that people are likely to listen to for their entire lives.

I sincerely hope you're wrong. Some of my favorite music is stuff I hated as a kid (John Lee Hooker, Little Walter, old jazz from the '30s and '40s), some of the stuff I hated as a kid I hate even more (the Archies, most of the Beach Boys), and most of the stuff I loved as an older teen and young adult I still love (Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Beatles, Van Halen, Ted Nugent).

I fear you may be right, however. The only band formed this century I'd even consider paying for is Buckcherry.

I've bought a lot of CDs from local bands, however. Most of the stuff I like these days they don't play on the radio. Perhaps it's because Clearchannel bought out all the stations?

This is why a lot of youngsters these days have a perception that albums only have one or two good tracks on them - because that is actually the case for the trash that's forced on them by advertising.

It was always pretty much that way. I was seventeen in sixty nine, and learned early to NEVER buy an album on the basis of a song on the radio. I'd buy "best of", "greatest hits", and live albums because I knew that there would usually be an album full of good stuff, whereas if I bought an album because of one song, I was lucky if it had two good songs.

Re: "physical media" on the way out?

[mcgrew]

In fact, they can create longer and more varies works using the digital medium then they ever could with an album.

Well, not really, but with CDs you don't have to turn it over and change albums. The Wall will fit on one CD, for instance, instead of two 2 sided albums. You don't have to turn Thick As A Brick over.

That's just a sign that you are old.

It's a sign that the young are clueless. Where are your John Lee Hookers? Your Chuck Berrys? Your Led Zeppelins? Your Pink Floyds? Your Matallicas and Megadeaths and Poisons? Your Nirvanas and Tools and Alice In Chains? There was great rock and roll for half a century, all my life in fact (I was an infant when Alan Freed coined the term), and it got better every decade until this pathetic decade came along and Clear Channel killed it.

You youngsters have the internet and all you can come up with is commercial jingles and Emo. WTF?? You have the greatest tool for making audio art the world has ever seen and you waste it!

Yay!

[i_liek_turtles]

I now feel like I'm livin' in a Slashdot paradise.

Re:Yay!

[Yvan256]

Let's party like it's 2099!

Uppercase name?

[I cant believe its n]

Use a font with serifs. After all, who wants to hear about some weird artificial intelligence creating music?

I'd like to see more move to this trend

[Uther2000]

I wish more "One-Hit-Wonder" groups/artists would do this, as well as many of the better groups/artists out there today.

The rise of the "channel"

[MosesJones]

This isn't really a surprise and its something that matches well with the podcast & channel concepts that are a major way that people track stuff they are interested in. For "traditional" bands who want a full album around a concept then it doesn't make any sense but for pop bands and satire/comedy it fits perfectly with the sort of instant response and dispose way that people consume the music today. Something like the "Multi-pass" concept on iTunes makes perfect sense for areas where people are interested in a given area and its responsive to current events (The Daily Show for instance).

Its not the death of the album for long term bands but it is the sort of direction that singles chart targeted artists and media companies will want to go after. You can easily see a music company creating a channel around their latest factory bands and having snippets in there to get people to go and buy a single track and keep updating it with the latest "hot" genetically engineered concept band every week, or day.

For someone like Wierd Al who works on parody its ideal to have the parody available while the original is still popular, especially if it could be seen as a counter culture to the manufactured band. Lets face it if there was a piece of crap at the top of the Billboard wouldn't it be funny to see a parody of the piece of crap at number one the following week? Its the sort of thing that short term internet crazes are made of.

Smart move and not at all weird. Now if he'd said he was only going to release his next album on vinyl then THAT would have been genuinely weird.

Interesting...

[BTWR]

Pretty cool concept. Just like it took an alt band like Radiohead to properly market an album over the internet, it's not surprising that someone like Weird Al has trailblazed this. Most artists rant about how ipods kill the "album experience." They are correct, to a point. I mean, albums absolutely have distinct feels to them as a whole. Weird Al probably agrees with this. At the same time, he is probably more like "Eh, the hell with it. This way my fans get new songs all the time instead of twice a decade."

Wierd AI

[javilon]

I it just me that thought that a wierd Artificial Intelligence was recording and releasing songs?

Re:first post

[MyLongNickName]

Dude

1st: This is about Weird Al. This clearly qualifies as nerd news.
2nd: This is about freeing us from the tyranny of packaged deals. Clearly this ranks higher than even the $700 Billion dollar bail out news.
3rd: This is about Weird Al. He is like the king of nerdiness.
And lastly, it is Weird Al.

Any questions?

White & Nerdy?

[EzInKy]

Such A Groovy Guy, It's All About The Pentiums. Headline News. Everything You Know Is Wrong!

Living With A Hernia, Doctor? Like A Surgeon, Dare To Be Stupid! Don't Wear Shoes. Smells Like Nirvana.

School Cafeteria: My Bologna, Eat It. Girls Just Want To Have Lunch. Fat, Fatter, Livin' In The Fridge.

Jerry Springer, Confessions Part III, Trash Day, Weasel Stomping Day, Toothless People, Addicted To Spuds.

The Checks In The Mail, Slime Creatures From Outer Space, Stop Draggin' My Car Around.

I Can't Watch This, I Lost On Jeopardy. Stuck In The Closet With Vanna White, Cavity Search. I Need A Nap.

Do I Creep You Out? I Think I'm A Clone Now. Callin' In Sick. I'll Be Mellow When I'm Dead.

This isn't really a progressive move as you think.

[Anonymous Coward]

So it sounds like a great idea. As soon as a track is mastered zip, out onto the Internet it goes, to an online store like iTunes most likely.

Why is that a problem? Well, for one, when you buy an album (assuming it isn't DRMed to hell), you get a perfect digital copy of the recording. Off iTunes or any of the like you're just not getting the same audio quality.

More importantly, however, the real reason behind this move is obvious -- BitTorrent. BitTorrent works best for large packages of files -- say, full albums in MP3 or FLAC form for the audiophiles :P If he's releasing one song at a time and someone wants to throw it up on The Pirate Bay as they're wont to do, they'll have to create a separate torrent for each single release...typically more people are going to be seeding than leeching, and since it's a small file, it'll very quickly become slower and slower to -get- that small file simply due to the fact that people are closing their clients as soon as they've got it.

It's a nice gesture on his part, but I don't think that people should take it without a grain of salt. If you look carefully enough there's potential financial motivations for making this decision as well, and it may actually -limit- your options as a consumer.

Nightly builds?

[4D6963]

But where can I get nightly builds of his songs? I'd surely enjoy being one of his beta listener.

White 'N Nerdy

[digitaldc]

Good god what a NERD! He is going to use the internet as a distribution medium? Good luck with that, you will ONLY have a worldwide audience and an instant connection. Just sell it in a store for an outrageous price - like NORMAL people!

First in my class here at MIT
Got skills, I'm a champion at D&D
MC Escher - that's my favorite MC
Keep your 40, I'll just have an Earl Grey tea
My rims never spin, to the contrary
You'll find that they're quite stationary
All of my action figures are cherry
Steven Hawking's in my library!

Re:first post

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you said it was about Weird Al, is this correct?

Re:first post

[MyLongNickName]

I may have left off this important detail. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Clearly the most important aspect of all this is the Weird Al angle.

JoCo For the Win

[iCharles]

Mainstream recording artists: once again treading a path previously taken by Jonathan Coulton.

Weird Al info

[Spy der Mann]

Here's Weird Al's official youtube channel.

Weird Al's speciality has been rewriting pop songs with completely unrelated topics (parody). Among his works are "eat it" ("Beat it" by Michael Jackson), "I think I'm a clone now" (I think we're alone now - sang by Tiffany), "Like a Surgeon" ("Like a Virgin" by Madonna), "Fat" ("Bad" by Michael Jackson), and most recently "White and Nerdy" (parody of "Ridin'" by Chamillionaire), and others.

White and Nerdy was one of Weird Al's most popular songs - it was rated platinum by the RIAA (yes, they also rate songs besides suing customers :P ) and as of 10 September 2007, it reached the 4th position on the Viral Video Chart.

Weird Al's songs have always been popular among anime fans, as they present pretty good opportunities for making parody AMVs, such as the ones in AMV Hell 4 (Golden boy - White and Nerdy). Another example is this snip from AMV Hell 4 (fast-forward to 3:30) using Weird Al's "A complicated song" (parody of Avril Lavigne's "Complicated").

Re:Carlos + Yankovic.

[Dogtanian]

I think you mean with Walter Carlos, unless you give into that "but I'm really a woman inside!" nonsense.

Well, plenty of studies have shown that transexuals have brain structures more akin to those of the opposite (physical) sex, so in the sense that "inside" means (I assume) who they are psychologically or as a person, it seems perfectly plausible.

But that aside, who gives a toss what Carlos wants to call him/herself? She must have been called Wendy at the time she first worked with Yankovic, so it's not changed since then, and if you're going to whine that she's not using her birth name then I expect to see you complaining the same way about Ringo Starr, Freddie Mercury, Cher, Ne-Yo, whatever... Carlos at least has a "valid" reason for changing her name, so your picking up the guy about using it just sounds like an excuse to whine about transexuals.

Re:first post

[MyLongNickName]

Yeah. What's this all about?

It's all about the Pentiums, baby.

Re:first post

[MyLongNickName]

I got introduced to Weird Al's music in Math camp when I was wee lad nearly 30 years ago. I very much associated him with nerdiness.

And now, I get to introduce it to my kids. Right now, Amish Paradise is their favorite, although my 3-year-old can already sing certain parts of 'Pentiums'.

What really...

[bhunachchicken]

... fucks me off about the way the industry sometimes operates is that they will release a song to be played on the radio, but not allow people to buy the fucking thing for up to 6 weeks later.

Huh?! I cannot count the times that I've heard a song on a radio and thought, hey, I like that, I'll head over to my favourite online story and buy a copy, only to discover I won't be able to until over a month later.

Spontaneous purchases, that's what is going to sell more of Al's records...

Re:What really...

[Hatta]

You hear songs on the radio and like them? Really?

Re:Carlos + Yankovic.

[notthepainter]

You probably didn't know that Wendy was also a gifted solar eclipse astrophotographer, did you?

Now that's a woman of note. Cool musician, cool geek.

http://www.wendycarlos.com/eclipse.html

Re:1955 called...

[Rob the Bold]

Many people may be surprised to find the term "Album" pre-dates the both 33rpm LP and the strategy of releasing a collection of pop singles on one disk. The first "Albums" really were "blank books", as the name implies, sold empty to hold multiple single disks and also sold with prepackaged collections of larger works. The disks slid into envelope-like pages bound into the book. A symphony recorded on 78s might appear in disks as sides A(n):B(n) as 1:((N/2)+1) . . . (N/2):N, to be played on an automatic turntable with just one stack flip.

I actually recently bought on of his MP3's

[sesshomaru]

I bought one of his MP3s from Amazon, "It's Christmas at Ground Zero." I really like that song, perfect for this coming Christmas, especially, don'tcha think?

Re:first post

[Lousifer]

Weird Al puts on a great show. Took the wife to a concert for her birthday. We had aisle seats, and when Weird Al was performing "Wanna B Ur Lovr" in his bright red pimp suit, he jumped up on the seat in front of us and sang a cheesy pickup line right at her. It was awesome. Musicians used to make their money doing just that - putting on a show people are willing to pay for, not being signed with the biggest label.

Re:This isn't really a progressive move as you thi

[Saffaya]

Well, for one, when you buy an album (assuming it isn't DRMed to hell), you get a perfect digital copy of the recording.

No, you are not, and for two reasons.

The first is that the CD-audio standard does not give you a perfect digital copy of anything.
It lacks sufficient error-correcting codes.

The second is that digital downloads can give you master-quality, or high definition audio, which are identical or extremely close to the original tune as designed by the artist
See Trent Reznor and his latest album release in 96kHz/24bits .WAV format.

Re:first post

[D'Sphitz]

(but isn't he just weird, and not really technical?)

Dude, he's fluent in Javascript AND Klingon.