Presumably the voiceover would be at the beginning of _every_ track (assuming the album HAS tracks) since music is often shared as tracks instead of as whole albums. Clearly nobody would want such a prefixed track to come up on shuffle etc. (the adverts every couple of songs on free spotify are just about bearable), and so would either chuck it in frustration, keep it but always end up skipping past it, or (with the slightest fragment of internet skills) trim it, if they liked it enough to keep it.

My question would be, what do you hope to achieve by introducing this inconvenience? If one person shares the trimmed version, you now have two versions floating around in cyberspace. The Wisdom Of Crowds would, in principle, weed out the ‘prefixed’ versions of the tracks (which are marginally less desirable).

A specific question: what sort of person would you expect to have their behavior changed by this scheme, what would be the nature of that change and what specifically would prompt the change?

Plus, from an artistic view point, the voiceover will inevitably form part of the soundscape and dent the integrity and clarity of the album.

Going back to Joanna’s point on distribution, and Paulie’s point about lazyness, surely the main focus should be on making the physical product as widely distributed and easily accessible as possible. I think this link might be something to do with what Joanna was talking about RE: China and Brazil: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/12/china-the-futur.html

The problem that we (and, I guess, nearly all recording musicians) face is that once one person copies a CD and makes it available in a public forum, there’s very little incentive for *anyone at all* to buy it. My thinking behind the distributable/voiceover-version is that it’s one way to try to discourage someone from ripping a CD: at least this way there’s a plea to be a nice person at the beginning of the record.

I do like the idea of having some stuff released for free, and extra stuff when you buy a copy, but then we’re back to the same problem of it only taking one person to rip that extra content and the need to buy vanishes. Maybe a combination of the two? Have a voiceover-introduced version, with most of the tracks, but not all of them?

It is a good “strategy” to allow people to have a easier access to your music, but I find very hard to believe that the people that download it for free will then pay for it.
And I don’t assume here that they are not willing to help, or are greedy.
I anticipate that most people won’t Pay for it out of pure lazyness. (unfortunetly a lot of people are not interested by the package, and those who are will probably buy it anyway)

A solution to that problem could be to motivate them in putting a slightly different music content If you proposed them to download two time the same stuff the majority won’t bother because it’s boring…

Can’t wait for its release, no matter how.
Cheers