It’s been a while since someone forged a game-changing plan to sell their own music (tiered pricing and various freemium models have been the norm among artists with a large existing fan base ever since Radiohead’s notorious pay-what-you-want In Rainbows scheme), but Kaiser Chiefs launched their fourth album, The Future is Medieval, today with an impressively innovative marketing concept (to the music industry), which should pan out as a worthy experiment at the very least: letting fans create and sell customized versions of the LP for personal profit. Here’s how it works…
Kaiser Chiefs created a well-designed interactive website where you can stream samples, choose 10 songs out of 20 total tracks recorded in sessions for the LP, sequence the tracklist, arrange the cover layout (digitally, rather than with stickers like Beck did for The Information), pay £7.50, and then sell your version of the record on a unique URL for £1 per sale.
They’ve also posted a gallery of various user-tweaked versions of The Future is Medieval, complete with a best-sellers chart. Our friends at Drowned in Sound posted their take on LP4 with the cover art shown above. You can take a look around and interact with this intriguing project here or give their new music video for “Little Shocks” a spin below: