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.
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
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.