Two bits of news relating to being about to buy my (and in the case of Bandcamp other people’s) music in bulk.
You may know that we started selling our entire back catalogue on a single 4Gb USB stick, just prior to the US tour. We continued to sell them on the tour, and they proved very popular with the iPod-wielding members of the audience. So we’re still selling them. Here’s a list of what’s on it:
My Solo Albums:
- And Nothing But The Bass: Live At The Troubadour (2000)
- Not Dancing For Chicken (2002)
- Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt 1 (2002)
- Grace And Gratitude (2004)
- Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt 2 (2004)
- Behind Every Word (2006)
- Ten Years On: Live In London (2010)
- 11 Reasons Why 3 Is Greater Than Everything (2011)
- Believe In Peace (2012)
Steve and Lobelia Albums:
- Live In Nebraska (2008)
- Live So Far (2010)
Lobelia Albums:
- 040515 (2004)
- Beautifully Undone (Songs I Wish I’d Written)
Other Collaborations:
- Conversations (Steve Lawson and Jez Carr) 2002
- For The Love Of Open Spaces (Steve Lawson and Theo Travis) 2003
- Live in Cambridge (Steve & Theo, previously unreleased, double length official bootleg) 2005
- Numbers (Lawson/Dodds/Wood) 2008
- Slow Food (Steve Lawson and Trip Wamsley) 2010
- Infrablab (Trip Wamsley and Steve Lawson) 2010
- As Yet Untitled Album (Steve Lawson and Mike Outram, Preview of forthcoming album) 2011
Video:
- Steve Live in Belgium (45 minutes)
All of the albums are in MP3 format, with all the official ones being 320K files. Both mine and Lo’s latest albums are also on there as 24bit FLAC files.
You can read a sort-of review of the USB Stick here.
All of that is just £25. Which, obviously includes a rather nice 4GB USB Stick as well. Insane value. Click the Paypal button below to buy it. (there’s an option on there to pay an extra £5 or £10 if you a) want to pay more or b) want to contribute something to the international postage, but it’s not compulsory…)
IF you don’t want the stick, or want to pay more (or less) for all the non exclusive stuff on there, Â you can now get multiple albums on Bandcamp, across different artist sites, with a single transaction, via their new shopping cart.
So you can go to my site, Trip Wamsley‘s site, Lobelia’s site, Mike Outram‘s Site, Lawson/Dodds/Wood‘s site, and another other bandcamp sites, collect them all together, distribute the cash across the albums however you wish (for those that are Pay What You Think It’s Worth), and pay once. Awesome, eh? Try It!
Finally, somebody else who agrees with the potential of distributing music on a USB drive (or indeed on an SD card)!
As somebody who goes to concerts and usually wants to buy the band’s album (if I like them), there’s little I find more frustrating than having to buy a CD and faff about ripping it to get it into a format in which I can most conveniently play it and archive it. I’d love it for more artists to distribute their work on solid state media – and I’d love to be able to cost effectively distribute my own work on solid state media as well.
Because you’ve accumulated such a big body of work, it makes sense for you to put it out on 4GB drives, but I think most artists would even struggle to fill a 1GB drive at the stages in the careers where they’re personally selling their work at concerts – I think for most of us 128MB would suffice, or 512MB for a discography.
But these days one can’t seem to get anything less than 4GB for love nor money, and unless one manages to buy in bulk you can’t get them for a price which you can then justify charging to your fans whilst they’re debating whether to go to the bar or come up to the stage.
So how might ‘we’ persuade the people who make USB drives / SD cards that there still is a market for low capacity drives?
We could def. Make good use of those too. You can get them branded, from the companies that make gifts/marketing tat for business – we’re looking into that now 🙂
Releasing albums on USB sticks. I think this is a really good idea! But I think for it to become a completely valid option for buying music, I think it has to be about the quality of sound. Bare with me a while…
There are many people (myself included) who are of the opinion that music recorded onto analogue tape and then pressed onto vinyl records have a superior sound to that of CDs. And it’s true that the sample rate of CDs (44.1KHz at 16 bit) is pretty low, but this was chosen at a time when that was the optimum that affordable consumer technology could feasibly cope with. Then came the advent of SACD a few years later. Whilst the quality was infinitely better (2.8224MHz at 1 bit!), people had to spend a lot of money on new equipment in order to play these discs.
Fast forward now to 2011 and the age of file sharing, Spotify and audio upload onto Youtube; people can get music for free but the quality is going downhill. Do people care? Well, yes and no I think. There will always be people who care about the sonic quality of the music they listen to and I reckon that if you give people who don’t know the difference the opportunity to hear what great quality music sounds like, it may be possible to make them see (or hear!) what all the fuss is about.
Therefore, my point is (or points are…) if albums are to be released on USB sticks, people need a valid reason to buy them and that reason should be that the music contained therein is of the highest quality possible. Then people can say, ‘Ok, you’ve emailed me this mp3 to let me know about that song; to inform me of it’s existence, and because of that I’ve gone out and bought THIS version of it – listen to THIS!’ Also, with the files being that large, it wouldn’t be as easy (or may even be impossible) to upload/email them, thus keeping ‘uploadable’ and ’emailable’ tracks to lower-quality bootleg status.
Another point would be that no new equipment would be needed to play these files; you’d have vinyl-quality music that could come out of your laptop and through your home hi-fi system.
Thinking about it, it actually seems odd that when music is recorded in a studio on a computer, it is recorded, a lot of the time, at the highest quality possible (96KHz or even 192KHz at 24 or 32 bit), and then reduced to be put onto a CD… Why can’t I hear the music at the quality the recording engineer records it at when, clearly, the technology is available for me to do so?
In the advancement of time, it may be possible to rip, upload or email files as big as these so maybe some copy protection needs to be built in to these USB sticks to keep the files on there so that they cannot be copied, at least at that resolution. Maybe it can be done that if you drag the files off the stick onto the desktop they will be converted into lower quality mp3s (in order to be put onto iPods etc.)?
In the end, it all MUST be about the quality – improving recording technology also – but, as it happens, it’s so convenient at the same time.
If I was interested in your 45-minute solo live video buyng…