I doubt I'm the first to call him St. Paul of Minneapolis

A while back, I wrote a bit about how thrilling it was for Paul Westerberg to release his album 49:00 as a single-MP3 download for 49 cents a copy. In a recent interview for the video game ROCK BAND 2, which features the Replacements' "Alex Chilton," Westerberg said that the reason he released it that way was:

Because it was wrong. Because it did what we used to do. I'm capable of doing that alone, by accident. It just shot everyone down in the world who's putting out their record for a dollar a song and it said "here, I'm gonna give you forty-something minutes of music for basically a penny a minute." It turned everything on its head for a week. It was nice. And it was nice for me to grab a big handful of my songs and get them out of my system. I kind of have a list; I crossed fifty songs off it. It was like, "Oh this [song] fuckin' blows," [but now] I don't have to worry about those. Even if you only heard one second of it, in my mind, it's done. I have to do that from time to time because I write all the time.

Again, it's cool to imagine a better form of AOR returning to pop music. But more to the point: Buying songs a la carte is nice and all, but let's not lie to ourselves; iTunes and Amazon sell you music at about the same rates as you paid for music on CDs, only the quality continues to decline [the complete sine wave of vinyl to the square wave of CDs to the sampled square wave of MP3s] and now you literally get nothing tactile to show for your purchase. Why are we paying a $1.29 a song, again?


Linkparking some more Westerberg goodness:

Color Me Impressed: Guitar tabs for Mats and Paul songs.

Fanblog Paulwesterberg.net, A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.