Wilco, one of a handful of major bands to embrace and exploit the Internet’s music-distribution capabilities, will offer six new songs on its Web site, Wilcoworld.net, beginning at midnight Tuesday.
The songs will be free to fans who bought copies of the last Wilco album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Listeners who put the CD into their personal computers will be directed to the band’s Web page, Wilcoworld.net, where they can access a media player that will stream the six songs in high-quality audio.
By punching in a five-digit code, the fans can then download the songs onto their hard drive. Artwork, graphics and recording information will also be offered as part of the download, with three optional covers and titles: More Like the Moon, Australian EP and The Bridge.
The six songs were issued in Australia as an EP-length CD last January to coincide with the Chicago quintet’s first antipodean tour.
Initially, the band had planned to release the EP domestically through its label, Nonesuch, but decided “that they didn’t want to sell a 21-minute record for 10 bucks or whatever it would cost to get into stores,” said the band’s digital strategist, Ken Waagner.
It wouldn’t be the first time the band has decided to make its music available on the Web. When Wilco’s previous deal, with Reprise Records, imploded, the band regained the rights to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, still unreleased, and began streaming the album on its Web site in the fall of 2001.
“Doing that totally saved our tour that year,” singer-guitarist Jeff Tweedy said. “We were able to play most of the new album because the fans already knew the songs from hearing them on the Web site and were singing along.”
Though record labels argue that free file-sharing and Net streaming deter sales, Wilco’s strategy had the opposite effect: when Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was finally released on Nonesuch in April 2002, it sold more than 50,000 copies in its first week, by far the best week of sales in the band’s history.
Foxtrot, which won the Village Voice’s annual critics poll as the year’s top album, has gone on to become the quintet’s most popular album, with sales approaching 400,000 in North America.
“We had 250,000 visitors on the Web site the first month that we streamed the album,” Waagner said.
“That success definitely had an effect on the decision to make the EP available for free. This is the band’s way of rewarding the people who bought the album. They consider it a companion to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.”
The EP includes one of the prime outtakes from the Foxtrot sessions, A Magazine Called Sunset, with lush keyboards and backing harmonies, and a remixed, more rhythmically aggressive version of the Foxtrot song Kamera.
But the prime attractions are four songs from recording sessions last year, the first batch of studio music to document the band’s latest lineup: founding members Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt; drummer Glenn Kotche; multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach; and programmer Mikael Jorgensen.
The songs include Handshake Drugs, built on a folk-rock groove reminiscent of the Velvet Underground’s third, self-titled album; Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard, a longtime concert staple, with Tweedy soloing on guitar; and More Like the Moon, an atmospheric ballad, with Tweedy taking several acoustic solos reminiscent of Willie Nelson’s melodic picking.
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