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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."
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...doesn't mean that he should.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
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.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
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.
I now feel like I'm livin' in a Slashdot paradise.
Use a font with serifs. After all, who wants to hear about some weird artificial intelligence creating music?
She made the willows dance
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.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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."
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?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
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!
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Yeah. What's this all about?
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See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year