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When The Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely hit record stores and online retailers on March 25th, it was the latest evidence that the music industry's old rules no longer apply. The band, led by the White Stripes' Jack White and singer-songwriter Brendan Benson, had announced the release only one week earlier — after finishing the record in the first week of March and immediately sending it to pressing plants. "The music business is so scared all the time, and I don't like living in fear like that," White says a few days after the album came out. "This is just a simple approach: Get it out as soon as possible."
Gnarls Barkley took a similarly unconventional tack with their new album, The Odd Couple, in March — abruptly pushing the release date up by three weeks after it leaked online. "What it proves is that the old system of three to four months of lead time is just a throwback," says Gnarls' manager, Jeff Antebi. "The record industry needs to move at Internet speed."
The Raconteurs recorded the album — which is bigger-sounding and more diverse than their 2006 debut — at Nashville's Blackbird Studios in two three-week sessions, the first last May and the second in February. "We let the songs tell us what to do, and if anything, we had to reel it in all the time," White says. "We were just going everywhere, exploring all different ways of writing songs together. The studio helped make these songs come alive in a way we couldn't have done in recording at Brendan's house."
No advance copies went out to press or radio. "Some of the media have been a little bit bruised, thinking this was to try to beat the critics," says White. "I don't care about that. The point was, review it after the fans have it. What's wrong with that?" He adds that the rapid release isn't that novel: "This is the way they used to do it. Bands didn't use to promote an album for four months before a record came out."
The Raconteurs are also following a path paved by Radiohead, who surprised fans last October by releasing In Rainbows online with ten days' notice. Nine Inch Nails pulled off a similar feat in March with a download-only instrumental album, Ghosts I-IV. But unlike Radiohead and NIN, the Raconteurs got vinyl and CD versions of the album to physical stores on the same day as the digital release. "They delivered the album [to their label] three weeks ago, and now it's in our stores — that's pretty amazing," says Joe Nardone Jr., co-owner of the Gallery of Sound record stores. Carl Mello, director of purchasing for New England record chain Newbury Comics, hopes the release will set a precedent for labels to move faster. "Just make it available," Mello says. "Make the customers happy."
Despite the unprecedented speed, the album still leaked early. A glitch at the iTunes music store — apparently due to an error by Warner Bros., the label releasing Consolers — made the Raconteurs' album briefly available four days early. And CDs that arrived early at retailers also quickly showed up online as unauthorized files. Releasing the album immediately online and letting record stores play catch-up — an approach taken by Gnarls — might have prevented the leak, but White says they were unwilling to penalize fans who prefer vinyl or CDs. "Nine Inch Nails, Gnarls and us have all done it in a different way," White says. "Over the next year or two, smoke will clear and the [approach] that makes the most sense will become how it goes. But when the music business started getting so scary for everybody, I just said, 'Man, just hurry up and get it over with.' It really gets annoying that you have to turn into some computer-whiz salesman once you're done mixing."
[From Issue 1050 — April 17, 2008]