Music, win
by Tommy
Last Friday’s The Ticket (supplementary magazine all about the arts in The Irish Times) had a really cool article on the back cover about a competition Surfjan Stevens ran, where members of the public sent in self composed Christmas songs and Stevens gave a special secret prize to the winner.
He eventually chose 33 year old Alec Duffy as the winner, and the prize turned out to be full legal ownership of an unreleased Stevens song called The Lonely Man of Winter. There were no conditions to the price, the song could be used/distributed as the winner saw fit.
Duffy had several possible revenue avenues. He could sell it to some company to use in a commercial, or simply sell off the rights again for a good bit of money. If money was not what he wished, he could simply put it up on his website for people to hear.
He ended up doing none of these things. He opted for a social experiment. He wanted to recapture an era when ‘to get one’s hands on a particular album or song was a particular experience’. He decided to hold once- or twice-weekly “listening sessions” in his Brooklyn apartment. He’d arrange tea and biscuits, while the listener would listen to the song through headphones (a preemptive measure against anyone recording it), and, depending on how many showed up, there’d usually be a talk/discussion afterwards. The listening sessions were free of charge.
Over the past year or so, people have travelled from all over the world to Duffy’s Brooklyn apartment. He’s not sure of the exact number of people but estimated it’s somewhere in the region of 100 so far.
For many of those who travelled, the attraction wasn’t only the hearing of a song there were unlikely ever to hear again, but also the fact that they were taking part in something so anti-Web 2.0. It was something so contradictory to the incontinent rush of information and abundance of music and songs. It was an ode to the times when music represented something special, not just something thrown out free in a newspaper to encourage it’s purchase.
Although not everyone is in agreement with what Duffy did (I’m looking at you, music bloggers), with some people going as far as to call him ‘a bastard’, I think it was quite cool.
I mean, he could have simply sold it to McDonalds for a few thousand (at least) for use in a TV ad, but instead he went for the non-profit (albeit cooler) option of these listening sessions.
Rock on.