Emptyeye

In April of 2008, I have a block of six days where I’m not working, and that further, I’ll be completely alone in the house. In those six days, I hope to rerecord (And hopefully mix and master) the songs that are linked to this page. These re-recorded songs will become my first sellable album, The Six Day Exile (So named for the six days I’ll have to record it).

So what’s this page then? Before I explain, let me talk a bit about the music industry in general.

The music industry is very backwards. And I’m not even talking about the RIAA’s resistance to file-sharing, their suing of pre-teen girls and grandmothers who likely don’t even know what an MP3 is. No, what I mean is that most other industries are “Try before you buy”–you can test drive a car before you buy it, look at a furniture set and at least have an idea how it might look in your house, and so on. The music industry, in contrast, is modeled on “buy before you try”.

Without getting into the silliness and uniqueness of this model–you can argue that the video game industry operates on a similar model, but they’re really the only two industries I can think of that operate this way–this presents a dilemma for those that don’t function as nameless cogs in the massive Industry Conglomerate. Namely, how does a musician or a band make an audience at large aware of its music, while at the same time giving them an incentive to buy a CD?

My own solution to this problem is the page you see here. In short, these MP3s are..well, MP3s for one, which DO have a (Slight) loss in quality from the original recordings. More importantly, though, they can best be described as “unproduced”. That is, I tried to make sure that no one thing overpowers anything else (And I didn’t really do that in places either). Other than that, though, these are very unpolished. In short, I’m hoping you’ll like what’s here enough that you’ll eventually pay money for re-recorded, more polished/produced/etc versions of them. We’ll see if it succeeds in a year or so, I guess. You can download the songs below, as well as getting their stories.

The Songs