Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Piracy Pioneers



DJ Danger Mouse, who's probably currently best known for being half of Gnarls Barkley, got his slightly-less well known start by mashing the Beatles White Album and Jay Z's Black Album to create the hip-hop masterpiece (and most appropriately titled album ever) The Grey Album. And, of course, what made The Grey Album such a fascinating piece of the pop culture landscape wasn't just that it was a good album, but that it was only available via illegal download, and thrived despite constant cease-and-desist letters from the owners of the Beatles and Jay Z's publishing rights. It also showed a person could achieve international stardom completely through free and illegal file-sharing.

How do you follow that act up once you've become an established star? Simple. Danger Mouse's new album will be released as an album of packaging, artwork, and a blank CD-R. That's right, no music will be included at all -- it will be up to the purchaser to find the music through their own illicit channels (there will be no legal downloads available).

Agree or disagree with the methods, you've gotta give it to the fella -- that is a cocky way to release an album, especially one with a line up like the one featured on the poster above.

If you can't wait to find it or have some sort of perverse objection to file-sharing (not that this website in anyway advocates the cool crime of illegal file-sharing), you can listen to it track-by-track here, courtesy of the latte-sipping liberals at NPR.

1 comment:

life of the beatles said...

He should make the game more interesting by sending out cease and desist letters ... ha ha