Last night, Brooklyn indie-rockers Grizzly Bear had a little problem with the pipes in their Yellow House… they were leaking all over the place! Their album Veckatimest—which has a release date of May 26—hit the net in a glorious 128kbps rip, which is essentially the equivalent of a MySpace stream underwater. Twitter-happy Grizz dude Edward Droste let loose a hesitant (albeit since-BALEETED) statement on the leak, and his Twittering fans came to his aid… in the form of squealing, spoiled, entitled brats begging for more hand-outs!
To be fair, a good 95% of the tweets were very supportive, and the sort of thing every musician likes to hear: True fans who won’t listen to such low-quality piffle, a bevy of promises to buy the CD or vinyl (sometimes multiple times) when they are released in June, and lots of approving comments about the record itself.
But then it mostly devolved into people asking Droste himself to leak a better copy of his own album! Feed me, Seymour! Feed me all night long!
Here’s how not to tell the musicians you like how to run their business:
THE DISRESPECTFUL DEMAND MASKED AS CUTESY COMMENT
mgslol: @EdwardDroste While you can’t fix the ‘leak’ part, you CAN fix the ‘low quality’ part…
gxkaushik: @EdwardDroste Hey…maybe someone could release a better rip themselves…. I have pre-ordered Veckatimest, by the by.
THE BACKSEAT MUSIC INDUSTRY DRIVER
musicvideomusic: @EdwardDroste You might as well leak it in high quality then… :) you don’t want people’s 1st impressions of the album to be lossy do you?
tereutereu: @EdwardDroste Perhaps you should intentionally leak a high-quality version yourself?
onegoodthing: @EdwardDroste: can “you” speed up at least the electronic release to get the high quality out there or is that a logistical impossibility?
THE O RLY APPROACH
CarlosSP: @EdwardDroste Leak a higher quality rip yourself. People have been waiting on this really badly.
THE JUST PLAIN DICKISH
haukurSM: @EdwardDroste so leak a higher quality one already, huh?
coolingpie: @edwarddroste YO, where can I get the leak?!?
wingman251: @EdwardDroste BUT WHERE CAN I FIND IT?!
THE HAVING NO CLUE WHATSOEVER HOW TO DEAL WITH PEOPLE SO NOT EVEN BOTHERING TO PHRASE THINGS IN A WAY THAT ISN’T INSULTING
jheri: @EdwardDroste Link please?
EdwardDroste [Twitter]
Grizzly Bear [Official site]
@2ironic4u: Some of us like naps. I don’t, but I know that some people do.
@2ironic4u:
Nap? Grizzly Bear plus The Decemberists? I’m suprised you didn’t fall into a COMA!
(I kid, I kid).
How could anyone take a nap to the decemberists, it’s the most grating terrifying music on the planet. The nasalness!
As for Grizzly Bear, wasn’t 100 percent behind Yellow House, but from the few spins of this new Valbum, I’m really liking what I hear a lot
@Tauwan: Haha, I was waiting for that. Seriously, the Decemberists are great live. Grizzly Bear, well-executed but just didn’t have the intangibles that make a great live act.
So, they got a FREE leak of the whole album THREE MONTHS pre-release, and they’re pissed that it wasn’t high-quality enough?
Wow, Louis CK was right - everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy:
I have the leak, and the album is really good. I’ve listened to it twice all the way through, but I don’t think I’ll listen to it again until the album comes out. A lot of the songs are cut short, which is really annoying, and the quality is very, very low. But hey, low quality doesn’t get the the way of incredible songwriting.
@2ironic4u: I must admit that I saw them open for the Books and the Books kinda killed them. It was early in their career, but, man, it was snoozy.
Having said that, live does not equal studio, so I am excited for the new album.
@borntohula: Who cares who Ed Droste is- he is some shmuck with a twitter feed who threw himself into this. The tone of this piece kind of rubs me the wrong way the way it lionizes Droste, and labels the internet as douchebags- you can’t unring a bell, and who knows what the “best” way to handle your album leaking- what 3 or 4 months early- may be, but twitter’s very nature is going to expose you to “Yo, where can I get the leak?” if you are talking about an album leak- whether your Ed Drost or Ed (shoot- I wanted to say Ed Grimley), uh, Nobody. And just because he is the “Artist(e),” doesn’t mean that he’s any better or worse than anyone else on twitter. He’s just another douche who has a self important streak running through him (not that there is anything wrong with that). I just get a little queasy around this kind of fawning- I’ll buy it on vinyl! TWICE! I <3 you! Tweet back, please tweet back…- but maybe I’m just another dick on the internet.
The Decemberists - indie rep/cred = Al “Year of the Cat” Stewart.
Twitter is a sure sign of the Apocalypse.
you’re absolutely right. droste has opened himself up to this, and regardless of who he is, there should be no air of “respectful distance” between him and the non-”artist(e)s” or whatever you want to call them, but don’t mistake what i said for fawning, either.
droste having full agency in his decision to be or not to be on twitter is beside the point. people who got their hands on a free download of an album 3 months prior to the album’s release date were complaining about said leak’s quality. that is just absurd. i realize that’s the nature of the internet, but when i said “they probably don’t know who ed droste is” i didn’t mean it in a sort of smug-meets-reverence “DO THEY KNOW WHO HE IS??!?” way, i just meant that the way they were pandering for a better quality album was not unlike the way i see people beg for an album to be re-upped on a .rar blog.
i realize that album leaks are an inevitability, and i’d much rather people be honest and direct with what they say, but are you suggesting that asking for a better quality one from the source is not in the least bit… retarded?
@Thesemodernsocks: One would think that if you’re clamoring for a band’s album you would at least know the name of said band’s lead singer.
Not asking you to recognize the touring keyboardist, but come on.
@brasstax: WavPack, please. :smug:
” musicvideomusic: @EdwardDroste You might as well leak it in high quality then… :) you don’t want people’s 1st impressions of the album to be lossy do you?”
I like this guy the least. I had to look up what “lossy” meant, and for some reason that word added to the douchiness.
Even allowing for the possibility that some of these (especially the latter ones) are meant as jokes, this is hilarious.
Anyone on the internet who incorporates the word ‘lossy’ into a discussion of digitized music automatically goes into the douche column. It’s almost always followed up with a request for FLAC.
wow, this kind of internet dickery is unparallelled. it’s like they don’t even know who ed droste is, aside from he haz de linx.
Can’t really understand why people are so excited about this. I saw these guys open for the Decemberists in Central Park a few years ago and it seemed like the perfect music for taking a nap.
@janine: Agreed. I cosign on this. It isn’t cheap to make music, regardless what a bunch of home ProTools junkies say. It isn’t cheap to tour. It isn’t cheap to buy equipment, etc. etc. Why is music not allowed to be worth something when, say, the Friday the 13th remake is?
@brasstax: David Pogue said it best: If lossless is the opposite of lossy, then is hopeless the opposite of Hopi?
@janine: Yikes. Sorry to get your hackles up like that- but I think you missed, or are intentionally mischaracterizing what I was wrestling with in that comment- my point was that nobody wins in this kind of situation, or in these ridiculous twitter interactions- not that music should be free, or that there should be no control. I agree that people who found the leak and want the retail quality are getting an inch and asking a mile, and that Grizzly Bear are clearly the aggrieved party here, but that you are throwing yourselves to the wolves when you expose yourself to something as completely wideopen as twitter. You are painting a target on yourself, and ought to expect that pot-shots get taken. This is, afterall, the internet. I myself was recently threatened with cartoon violence.
So no. You don’t have it straight.
@borntohula: And I’d say its not retarded, who else is likely to have the high quality files? I’d say its impolite.
@Thesemodernsocks: I try to stay classy, but if I could punch you through the screen, I would. Seriously. No. I do not like Grizzly Bear, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to make music anymore… If I have this straight, a musician does not have to right to make a living off of music or have a say in how their music is put out there…. wow. just freakin’ wow.