For the past 9 years, I have written songs and fronted for a music side project slash band called Onalaska. This week, we released our second album, You and the Fishermen, a project started in June, 2005.

Rather than finding a record label to fund the  manufacturing and distribution of compact discs or vinyl, the album is available for download at the link below. The download is free, and the album is presented as eight MP3 files with absolutely no digital rights management restrictions. The album  is released under a Creative Commons license that permits reuse and republishing of the content, so long as attribution is provided with any reuse, and so long as any reuse is licensed under the same CC license.

To date, the band has spent $5,000 to produce the album, most of which went to equipment and hall rental, and to the purchase of a Pro Tools rig for the recording session. This is a pretty modest budget for an album, and I will leave it to your judgment to determine if the modest budget affects the quality of the final product.

Given the small investment, and the limited revenue potential of the project--Onalaska does not tour, and it is becoming increasingly clear that touring is the most effective way for musicians to make money--there seemed little point in making You and the Fishermen into a commercial endeavor. In an attempt to recoup some of  the sunk costs, an Onalaska T-shirt (the first and only official T-shirt associated with Onalaska) is available for purchase at Cafepress.com. The shirt runs $23, a steep price that is hopefully made more acceptable by the price of the album.

Since its release last Sunday, over two hundred people have downloaded the album. That's a pretty good result considering the minimal publicity (a MySpace bulletin entry, an update to the little-visited official Onalaska web site, a photo on Flickr, and now this blog entry).

I am proud of the work and am extremely gratified to know that so many people are giving it a listen. While we did not initially expect to spend over two years crafting these eight songs--there is a ninth, and I reserve the right to release it at some future date--I am glad we did. Each song has been fully realized, both in lyrical content, structure and arrangement. Every moment on the album is deliberate. Each song has a significant personal meaning to me. What a luxury it is to have complete creative control.

And since the album is released as a free-as-in-free-beer download, I reserve the right to remix, altar and re-post new versions (1.1, 2.0?) of the album in the future. This is a definite benefit--though one I am unlikely to exercise; two years is enough!--of an online distribution model. Compare this to the CD distribution model, where tens of pounds of plastic and paper lay in cardboard boxes for months and years, where the band's chief challenge is to convince people to take said plastic and paper off their hands. No thanks. This free download online distribution model feels much closer to how things should work going forward.

Download You and the Fishermen now