Dickie's Quickies

Paul Weller is offering fans an opportunity to buy his new album, "As Is Now" before it's October 10th release date (11th in the States). What's extraordinary is that fans are also being allowed to buy the album as an mp4 digital download along with 2 videos (the ones made thus far) also as part of the download AND that the download will unlock on October 3rd so that digital buyers can listen to the album 1 week before it hits the stores. In addition, buyers can purchase just the CD, a limited edition CD + DVD, just the downloads, the CD + download versions, or the limited edition CD + DVD + download versions. Prices range from $9 (British Pounds) to $21 (BP). This is a great way to market albums. It creates word of mouth and is consumer friendly in a number of ways. To purchase the downloads, one has to first download the Tell Jack download manager from Weller's label, V2 (Virgin subsidiary). Link to buy.

In other listening news, I'm playing around with Last.fm. It's a social interaction, music site. Users download a plug in for their music player (iTunes, Foobar 2000, Real, other) and hit play on their player. The plug in transmits back to Last.fm the track artists and song titles. Users can then go to the site and enter tags for the songs they've listened to a la Flickr. As time goes on, Last.fm pairs users us, suggesting other users that you might want to explore their tastes. If available, they offer songs by artist for streaming and they offer to sell the albums (based in the UK). The benefits are that users can share musical tastes and discoveries and chat with other users online in the forums. The company, meanwhile collects data on listening habits, keeps track of most played tunes, sells "tag" information, etc. In the licensing agreement, they promise to never reveal personal data and, in fact, users choose how much of that they want to share.