And the fight for most creative record release continues: British indie band Kaiser Chiefs is out with a new disc, The Future Is Medieval, and the group is letting fans create their own version of the album.
When you visit the band's website, you're asked to choose 10 of 20 tracks to go on your own personalized album. You can then design an album cover using a variety of pre-selected images. Once you've purchased the disc, you'll be given your own page from which to sell the album and earn one pound per sale via PayPal.
The whole project was conceptualized by the band, Universal Music UK and Wieden + Kennedy London, after W+K's Oli Beale and lead singer Ricky Wilson met up in a fish-and-chip shop for a chat.
To be sure, this is a creative way to get fans engaged in your music (and to market and sell your tunes, as well), but at this juncture, we have to ask: Is this level of fan control taking matters too far? Why write and record 20 songs when fans can only choose 10? What about the consistency of an album that comes from a band choosing how songs flow into each other? The album doesn't appear to be for sale in any official format via iTunes or Amazon, either, but you can buy "Ricky's version."
This isn't the first time a band has crowdsourced a disc, per se. Devo did the same thing with its album Something for Everybody; the disc’s 12 tracks were chosen through a “Song Study” in which fans chose which songs would be included. Still, Devo is famous for being bafflingly tongue-in-cheek.