Jeff has a great post explaining why “Harvey Danger”:http://harveydanger.com will be posting their new album for free download in a few weeks.
Rock and Roll McDonald’s
We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record.
Jeff gave me a copy of _Little by Little_, the new “Harvey Danger”:http://harveydanger.com CD today. I’ve been listening to a copy of the master for the past few weeks and really liking it, but it’s cool to see the finished product. The design and “artwork”:http://www.ytje.com look great. It definitely has fetish value as a physical object in a way almost none of the other CDs I own do. Some of the LPs in my record collection, on the other hand…
I took the opportunity, now that I have the album and bonus CD, to enter track information into CDDB and freeDB. The general public won’t be able to get their hands on the album until September 13th, but this way people getting the hundreds of review copies being sent out won’t have to enter track info when they rip things for their iPod (or similar device). At least I hope they won’t have to. I don’t know how long it takes submissions to show up.
I also used “MusicBrainz”:http://www.musicbrainz.org to take audio fingerprints and submit them to their database. I really like the idea of MusicBrainz, which uses the content of a track to identify the music, rather than the lenghts of the tracks on a disk. Unfortunately, it seems to do a kind of random job. “Cream and Bastards Rise” which I think may be the first single has the same fingerprint as something like a dozen other songs by various artists.
It’s too bad, too, because something like Musicbrainz, if it worked could solve the problem of “Paranoia by Green Day”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&c2coff=1&safe=off&pwst=1&q=paranoia+green+day&spell=1 which is really “Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=flagpole+sitta+harvey+danger&btnG=Search, which is probably the result of a few people mistagging an untagged MP3 of Flagpole Sitta they got off of Napster and then spreading it around again by P2P.
I’ve been spending some more time today load-testing webserver software in preparation for the online release of the next Harvey Danger album. When I “wrote last”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000612.html I’d just finished looking into resource utilization of “Apache2”:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/ (with both the prefork and worker multiprocessing modules), “thttpd”:http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/, and “lighttpd”:http://www.lighttpd.org/.
Today I’ve been taking a closer look at lighttpd and thttpd. What I’ve found has been sort of a mixed bag.
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8/11/05
1: Death Cab for Cutie – Soul Meets Body
2: The White Stripes – My Doorbell
3: Madness – Shame and Scandal
4: Beck – Girl
*5: Harvey Danger – Cream and Bastards Rise*
6: Nine Inch Nails – Only
7: Rise Against – Swing Life Away
8: Foo Fighters – DOA
9: Caesars – It’s Not The Fall That Hurts
10: Weezer – We Are All on Drugs
Last week I mentioned that I’m “helping out with infrastructure”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000612.html to prepare for the release of the next Harvey Danger album. At the time, I could only hint at why it was important, but last week, “the band announced”:http://www.harveydanger.com/news/ that they will be releasing the album as free download on the net a couple of weeks after the CD goes on sale.
Today, “Jeff layed out more details”:http://jeffjlin.typepad.com/rock_and_roll_mcdonalds/2005/08/inching_ever_cl.html on how the release is going to work. In the coming weeks, expect to see more from Jeff on the thinking behind this bold move.
bq. Sept. 13 — Album (deluxe double-CD edition) released in stores
Sept. 20 — Electronic version of the album seeded to Bittorrent
Sept. 27 — Electronic version of album available for download from harveydanger.com
p. Until a week or so ago, I was viewing the Bittorrent as checklist item that would be cool and fun to do even though most people would end up using the web download, but now I’m pretty excited about it, especially since there will be a full week between the bittorrent release and the http release.
I’d intended to post more tonight about the considerations I’ve been working through to get the infrastructure planned and deployed, but its past my bedtime, so it will have to wait. So, come back here for more on the “How,” and keep an eye on “Jeff’s blog”:http://jeffjlin.typepad.com/ for the “Why.”
I’m helping “my friend Jeff”:http://jeffjlin.typepad.com/ with some of the preparations for the release of the release of the next “Harvey Danger album”:http://harveydanger.com. The current site runs on a shared hosting account with “a reputable provider”:http://www.pair.com, but the band will need a big upgrade to help with a promotional strategy that calls for the distribution of some big (50MB+) media files. This is where I come in.
To make a long story short, thanks to Moore’s law and Ebbert’s fraud, servers and bandwidth are pretty cheap these days. Even so, it makes sense to make the most of what you have. In this regard, “lighttpd”:http://www.lighttpd.net/ looks like it might be a better bet than Apache for dealing with serving up big files that take a while to download.
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