Paul Westerberg releases 49 cent album, one-ups Radiohead
While Radiohead gets all the love for experimenting with the distribution and business aspect of selling music online, Paul Westerberg has taken the next step and released an album that simply wouldn’t exist without the ability to go directly to his fans. “49″ is an entire album in the form of one-long MP3, a noisy, self-recorded burst of rock n’ roll energy that violates the traditionally accepted structure of the “album,” and you can download the entire thing for $0.49 from Amazon.
Westerberg’s site contains the following message:
WARNING: DO NOT LISTEN WHILE OPERATING A MOTOR VEHICLE
THIS PRODUCT IS NOT FAULTY - ALL SOUNDS ARE INTENTIONAL AND VALID AS A WORK OF ART
There’s no track listing, some parts are snippets of music cut together with other songs, crashing in and out of each other, it’s chaotic and charming, brilliant and maddening all at the same time. Darren Hill, Wetserberg’s manager, was quoted in The Guardian:
“He finished it on Monday, sent it to me on Tuesday and it was out this weekend,” Hill explained. “It’s just wonderful that you can actually do this. The freedom an artist can enjoy these days is fantastic. Can you imagine me pitching this idea to a label?”
The surprise release is grabbing a lot of attention, (see Pitchfork, The Onion AV Club, The LA Times, Wired, Stereogum, and many others), but Jim Connelly over at Medialoper has an interesting take on the release:
Because its not just full songs, it’s also song snippets. Then its two songs playing at the same time, and excerpts from cover versions that fade in and out, and then, suddenly, I’m in love, what’s that song?
No really, what’s that song?!?
It’s all a bit of a mess, really. But that’s OK, because it only costs forty-nine cents. In a strange way, Westerberg has used the internet to bootleg himself.
Because it’s such a mess, you might wonder who is going to listen to it more than once, and then you realize that because it’s a nice big digital file, what will eventually happen is that his fan base will come up with consensus names for all of the songs, and song snippets, and the time codes for everything.
And that’s exactly what’s happening on the discussion boards at PaulWesterberg.com, where the new album is receiving overwhelmingly positive response from his fans, who are dissecting and discussing every minute of it.
Best of all, it’s rumored that Westerberg doesn’t even own a computer.
