John Darnielle has announced that The Mountain Goats will be independently releasing a new EP, produced by Scott Solter, entitled Satanic Messiah EP, as a double-7″ in a “hi-gloss UV gatefold sleeve […] in a limited edition of 666 copies,” and only available at shows.
“But wait!” I hear some of you saying. “If I send you some money will you send me a copy?” Let me answer this question once, and once only, and for all time: no. What you will be able to do, though, is download the whole EP from a dedicated site that we’re setting up right now. I hope/expect/pray that the site will be ready within a month or so. The songs will be available in both MP3 and AAC formats at high resolutions, and also, if I can figure out how to make and seed a torrent, as AIFFs, which digitally speaking is the best way to hear them, since Scott Solter is an awesome producer. The downloads will be open to everybody, with no hoops to jump through, though there will also be several options available for those who want to pay me for my work, since part of the point of the exercise is to see whether that’s a viable route for smaller-potatoes-than-Radiohead dudes like me.
Exciting news. Cool to see more bands experimenting with new business models and distribution methods. Darnielle, as a fellow music obsessive, has an unusually open relationship with his fans, regularly getting (deeply) involved in various threads on his zine’s message boards. So I predict that his real fans (myself included) will be willing to support his endeavors.
MP3: The Mountain Goats – “Source Decay” (live in San Francisco, October 23, 2002, courtesy of the Live Music Archive. One of my all-time favorite songs, originally appearing on All Hail West Texas.)