why
Hey, let's get real pretentious for about three sentences: The part of
this band that's politically active thinks that creating sustainable
behaviors is vital for the continued survival of the human species. That
means conserving limited natural resources, and reducing the amount of
waste we all produce. We also think that music and other forms of art are
important and worthwhile. We hope to find a balance between these things.
We originally made the decision to make physical, plastic copies of our
debut album (we did use packaging from Oasis
with reduced environmental impact). And originally, we didn't plan to make
most of the record available for download. We've changed our minds, and here's
some of what we were thinking and why we changed our minds:
There's an ugly war on. On one side are copyright holders (who mostly aren't
the musicians, but are mostly big multinational corporations) and hardware vendors. On
another side are music fans and listeners. We're not sure there are only two sides,
but we're sure which side we're not on. We are music fans and listeners.
One of us (it's doug) really, really hates the way 128K MP3's sound. But
lots of people just don't care, and on computer speakers and inexpensive
headphones, it may be hard to tell the difference anyway, and even doug
admits that the encoders have gotten better, and we've got high-bandwidth files
available if you do care. We also think ogg is
a great addition to the digital music landscape, and we're glad there's a lot more support
for it.
We still kinda like to have our record exist in a form that you can hold in your
hands. If it's just sitting on a hard drive somewhere, it seems so
ephemeral somehow, one disk-crash away from gone forever. And we like
having pictures and stuff on the sleeve: the whole package is supposed to
be an aesthetic experience: hold it, look at it, play it, hear it. But
the idea that you need to have a piece of plastic (or vinyl or whatever)
to listen to music is clearly on the way out.
whine
We would still like your help with a few things:
We recorded "Don't Entertain Me Twice," a song originally by Game Theory,
and we have limited rights to that song, which don't include making it
available to everybody to download. Out of respect for the song's
composer, Scott Miller, we ask that you not share that specific song over
P2P.
If you download our songs, and you like some of 'em, we hope you will
share 'em, in any format you like. Some of us love getting and making mix
CDs and tapes. But we also hope you'll leave our name and contact info on
anything you distribute, so that if some of your friends like our stuff
they know where to look for more.
Lastly: We financed this record out of our own pockets.
A good chunk of it is still racking up interest on credit cards we hold.
We hoped (OK, we still hope) to sell some of those pieces of plastic
(CD Baby CD Street
Amazon PayPal, mail order)
to defray the cost of recording in a good studio and pay off our debts. We
also have T-shirts (including unbleached
natural cotton shirts) for sale, and we play live (although mostly not far
from Washington DC). If you download our music and you like it, and you would
like to hear some of the new songs we've written but haven't recorded, please consider
supporting us by buying our wares or seeing us play. You can also donate to our
recording fund by PayPal, if you're so inclined. We will come up with cool
things to send people who help out.
Thanks for listening.
-- feckless beast