Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Free Music (by Real Musicians!)

Since I mentioned the upcoming Marillion album, Happiness is the Road, the other day, I thought I'd pimp the band's latest attempt at publicity. They've taken a page from Radiohead's playbook and made the album available online:

Rock group Marillion are to make their new album available as a free download through file-sharing websites.

But a pop-up box will appear on computer screens when the tracks are first played, encouraging fans to give the band their e-mail address.

Keyboardist Mark Kelly said downloaders would be contacted with offers of gig tickets and other merchandise, to try to make some money back for the band.
I like Mark's complete honesty:
Kelly acknowledged that making Marillion's music available for free was against his natural instinct - 'we come from a long tradition of selling it'.
Indeed. If you've ever wondered what Marillion is all about, here's your chance. I can't vouch for the new album yet (I'm not up on file sharing stuff, so unless somebody wants to download it and send me a copy), but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. And you can't beat the price!

UPDATE: Those (like Red) who are curious to see what the band sounds like can download the album (track by track) from Music Glue here.

1 comment:

Paul said...

Kudos to them! I'd never heard of them before reading about them here, but I'll be looking for that album to download.
I love that they mention that Radiohead only got 2 pounds per download when they gave away their latest in exchange for donations, and then admit that 2 pounds per album is more than they would have received from their label. How said.
The labels' days are numbered.