Harvey Danger is making their new album free for download:
In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal†file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.
I just dowloaded it but haven’t had a chance to listen yet. I will say that, as they are returning from a period of obscurity, it certainly makes more sense to have a heavily downloaded free album than one that sells poorly and ends up in discount bins. If they are staging a comeback, this is a brilliant way to do it. As tech guru Tim O’Reilly recently observed about authors a propos the Google Library controversy, obscurity is a bigger threat that infringement or piracy.