Josh Tillman is set to release his latest album as Father John Misty next month, but he's created an entirely new streaming service to give fans a preview of the new disc.
Trying to eliminate the high costs of both buying and making music, he poses the questions: "How do we find a way of extending the joy of free to the artist as well as the fans? Is there a way to prevent anyone from spending money ever?"
Tillman's solution was to team up with psychoacoustics researcher and software developer Casey Wescott (who you may know from a band called Fleet Foxes) to create SAP — a new streaming service that allows users to decide whether or not they like the music enough to pay for it, based on the most fundamental elements of the songs.
A statement from Tillman about the new project reads:
I am pleased to introduce SAP, a new signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are "sapped" of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere and other distracting affectations so the consumer can decide quickly and efficiently whether they like a musical composition, based strictly on its formal attributes, enough to spend money on it.
SAP files sound incredible when compressed and streamed at low resolutions over any laptop speaker or cell phone. They are cheap to produce and take up even less space than the average MP3. They contain just enough meta-data to be recognized by sophisticated genre aggregation software. Everything you love about discovering and sharing free music, minus the cost to anyone: artist or fan.
Serving as his own guinea pig for the project, Tillman's I Love You, Honeybear is currently streaming via SAP over at the Father John Misty website. Of course, the whole thing is kind of hilarious, and we have a feeling this may be the first and last we hear of SAP.
If you like what you hear and want to drop the cash on the new record (muzak version or not), it will hit shelves on February 10 via Sub Pop.
Trying to eliminate the high costs of both buying and making music, he poses the questions: "How do we find a way of extending the joy of free to the artist as well as the fans? Is there a way to prevent anyone from spending money ever?"
Tillman's solution was to team up with psychoacoustics researcher and software developer Casey Wescott (who you may know from a band called Fleet Foxes) to create SAP — a new streaming service that allows users to decide whether or not they like the music enough to pay for it, based on the most fundamental elements of the songs.
A statement from Tillman about the new project reads:
I am pleased to introduce SAP, a new signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are "sapped" of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere and other distracting affectations so the consumer can decide quickly and efficiently whether they like a musical composition, based strictly on its formal attributes, enough to spend money on it.
SAP files sound incredible when compressed and streamed at low resolutions over any laptop speaker or cell phone. They are cheap to produce and take up even less space than the average MP3. They contain just enough meta-data to be recognized by sophisticated genre aggregation software. Everything you love about discovering and sharing free music, minus the cost to anyone: artist or fan.
Serving as his own guinea pig for the project, Tillman's I Love You, Honeybear is currently streaming via SAP over at the Father John Misty website. Of course, the whole thing is kind of hilarious, and we have a feeling this may be the first and last we hear of SAP.
