50FOOTWAVE is proud to announce "Free Music!" -- a 5 song Ep of new studio recordings to be given away via the band's website www.50footwave.com/freemusic or www.throwingmusic.com/freemusic as well as several partner sites including Archive.org and the sometimes controversial BitTorrent tracker DimeADozen.org
The band will be offering FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files as well as hi-resolution mp3 files. The band is also encouraging fans to seed BitTorrents and set up CD burning trees to ensure that people without time or technology may also receive the free music.
The tracks will include Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licenses (for more info on Creative Commons, see www.creativecommons.org)
The band states its goal as simply to circumvent the 'money cycle' and get high quality (free) recordings into the hands of a maximum number of people for evaluation at their leisure.
The band’s manager, Billy O’Connell, says, “The capacity for reaching new ears with unknown music has become so diminished that we felt we had to try a new approach. It has become prohibitively expensive to reach people via traditional marketing means (radio, press, retail promotion) – lately, CD distribution costs and even touring costs have gone through the roof.
“This project is simply attempting to tap the power of the network -- we're asking individuals for their enthusiasm rather than their money. It's an experiment we're eager to see play out.”
The band’s founder, Kristin Hersh, explains, "Money has so polluted the music world that my overwhelming urge right now is to divorce money from recorded music. Over the last 2 years we've been relying on standard “industry” channels to help us educate listeners about 50 Foot Wave and we've met resistance every step of the way -- caused by little other than money -- and to an extent I've never seen before.
"So we're sending free recordings off into the world to do their work.If people enjoy these songs and are excited by them, we ask that they share them with others. The music business is about fame and huge profits -- egos and greed -- music itself, is not.”