Sidewalk Hustle

One of the sad­dest things about the music busi­ness is how archaic and antiqued the whole process is. Not the actual mak­ing of music, but the wait time between the com­ple­tion of an album and the offi­cial release date. What even­tu­ally hap­pens is that the album is done, it gets leaked on the inter­net, peo­ple down­load and fall in love with it, then 3 months later it is offi­cially released and it is old news. The album doesn’t sell, and the artist gets sh*t on by the label. The only upside is that as long as the album is dope peo­ple will still pay to see you perform.

Any­way, the rea­son for this dia­tribe, and there is one, you will see, is my new favourite band, Bro­ken Bells. Bro­ken Bells is com­prised of artist/producer Dan­ger Mouse aka, Brian Bur­ton and singer/songwriter James Mer­cer.  These names no doubt ring famil­iar as Bur­ton is the one half of the world­wide sen­sa­tion Gnarls Barkley, made pop­u­lar by their awesome-turned incred­i­bly annoy­ing song “Crazy” and Mer­cer is the vocal tal­ent behind the phe­nom­e­nal and emo­tion evok­ing indie band, the Shins.  The Bro­ken Bells project was first announced on Tues­day, Sep­tem­ber 29, 2009 and shortly there­after, on Decem­ber 14 the band released their first email update, in which a binary-coded mes­sage stat­ing ‘The High Road is hard to find’ was dis­played, offer­ing a link to the band’s web page. On the morn­ing of Decem­ber 21, the band informed fans in an e-mail mes­sage of the release of their debut sin­gle “The High Road”, which was made avail­able as a free down­load on their offi­cial site. The self-titled debut album is due out in the U.S. on March 9, 2010.  How­ever, and yes this is where my pre­vi­ous rants comes in, the album leaked on to the inter­net on Decem­ber 22, 2009 and is now on heavy rota­tion on mine, and many other peo­ples iPod.

I love this album so much that I want to pur­chase it right now, and give these two musi­cal tal­ents my money, yet the album is not due out for another two months. You see how the music busi­ness is in a state of decay? With every pass­ing minute they are lit­er­ally los­ing money! The quick­est and eas­i­est solu­tion I can see, and rather obvi­ously I might add, is that once the album is done, have it avail­able for dig­i­tal down­load until you can ship the actual album to the stores, that way peo­ple have the option to buy it and instead of “steal­ing” it. Seems sim­ple enough to me.

Okay so now that that sec­ond rant is done watch the video for “The High Road” directed by the acclaimed Sophie Muller, and tell me you don’t love it… I insist.