Petteri Pyyny
15 Sep 2000 18:26
Offspring has been probably the loudest and most known band to officially support Napster. They even started selling Napster promotion stuff through their website earlier this year.
And now band kicks their record label's a** again -- their latest single, "Original Prankster", is available for free download through band's website, Offspring.com.
And that's not all -- band will give $1 million to one of the downloaders. And this money doesn't come from the record label, nuh-uh -- band gives that $1M from their own pockets.
"This money came directly to us from our fans," says Offspring frontman Dexter Holland, in a statement. "We feel it would be cool to redirect it back to them. We are trying to launch our album with promotions that are fan supportive rather than fan exploitative. We feel that giving them our music and letting them have back some of their money is a great way to show how much they mean to us."
The winner of the contest will be announced 14th of November on MTV.
"Original Prankster" is a single from band's forthcoming album Conspiracy of One -- band is going to publish the whole album on the Internet for free. But they have this funny twist -- which you can pretty much compare to Stephen King's honor payment method -- those fans who actually "bother" to buy the physical CD as well, will get bunch of joys other than the music -- owners of the original CD get the access to The Offspring Nation website which offers chats, fan material and more exclusive free MP3 downloads.
I think that this kind of "honor your fan and he'll honor you" method is the one that will actually be the future of the multimedia. Stephen King has shown already that it works pretty well (even that the current payment/download rate is around 70% instead of being above 75%) -- I'm sure that Offspring will get huge success if their album contains similiar hit material as their previous album did.