A while back, I found the most worthless thing on the internet. I thought that what amounted to a dryly written recap of a baseball game that never happened and never could happen would be the most useless thing ever conceived. I was wrong. This is the most useless thing on the internet, courtesy of Spin Magazine and apocalyptic Canadians Arcade Fire.
It's sort of like when bands give away a single or part of an album for free, in the hopes that people will pay money for the whole thing. Many bands do this, for instance, on NPR's "First Listen." Whole albums are available for streaming ahead of their official release date so fans and prospective fans can hear it--then, when the album comes out, the streaming stops and they have to buy it in order to continue to hear the music they've been enjoying. (Or they could just go to YouTube, but that's a discussion for another day.) It seems like a good way to attract media attention, gain good will from your fans, and maybe sell more albums.
That's not what the Arcade Fire did. Instead, they released two 10-second snippets of music that will be on their next album. It sounds okay, although one 10-second sample is just an instrumental, but that's not the point. Presumably they recorded and mastered and mixed both of these songs in their entirety, since recording only ten seconds of music would be insane, so why not just fucking put both songs out there? Do they think this will make people want the new album more? Did they read The Game and decide that being withholding would get them laid? Or does Arcade Fire believe that 20 seconds of music from them is equivalent to a whole song or a whole album by another band?
Maybe they have the right idea though. I'll give it a try--here is a preview of my next blog post:
...the problem with information is...
Wasn't that awesome?
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