Such Great Heights

23 Sep 2004

Since the release of Give Up early last year, Sub Pop records has offered the Postal Service's two lead singles available as free downloads on their website, and they've sold more than 300,000 copies of their album. Despite the fact that the songs have been downloaded, for free, 1.5 million times since then, Such Great Heights and The District Sleeps Alone have both been in the top 100, sometimes at the same time, on the iTunes Music Store for the past several months.

But I've worked with the music industry in the past... I'm pretty sure they still think we're all a bunch of thieves.

Posted on Thursday, September 23, 2004 at 1:14 AM

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Last weekend, Memex 1.1 drew our attention to a report looking at file-sharing in the TV, movie, software and music markets. This report, conducted by Jonathan A. Zdziarski utilising the services of Slashdot, is published here. At the school I Read More »
That old Digital Rights tune again ... | September 26, 2004 4:43 PM

4 Comments

I'm sure someone's looking at this from the other side, speculating they might have sold another 50,000 copies had they not allowed any free downloads. They're taking a gamble that these two freebee's will be enough to entice people to buy the entire CD, likewise the CD singles both include three additional tracks each that a fan might be willing to pay for.

For someone like me (and I admit I'm not a typical case) who hasn't listened to commercial radio for the last ten years or so, doesn't watch much television and pretty much exclusively discovers new music through friends or coworker's shared iTunes libraries (where's your's Anil?) linking to that download page might have been the only way I would have discovered the Postal Service. My introduction was in fact Such Great Heights being on a mix CD and friend made.

But, everything looks perfect from far away.

Jamison | September 23, 2004 2:52 PM | Reply

I'm sure someone's looking at this from the other side, speculating they might have sold another 50,000 copies had they not allowed any free downloads. They're taking a gamble that these two freebee's will be enough to entice people to buy the entire CD, likewise the CD singles both include three additional tracks each that a fan might be willing to pay for.

For someone like me (and I admit I'm not a typical case) who hasn't listened to commercial radio for the last ten years or so, doesn't watch much television and pretty much exclusively discovers new music through friends or coworker's shared iTunes libraries (where's your's Anil?) linking to that download page might have been the only way I would have discovered the Postal Service. My introduction was in fact Such Great Heights being on a mix CD and friend made.

But, everything looks perfect from far away.

Jamison | September 23, 2004 2:52 PM | Reply

I've worked for a major label for a little over 2 weeks now and they do indeed and they don't want to hear anything different...

Jason DeFillippo | September 23, 2004 11:40 PM | Reply

Well, I had "Such Great Heights" automagically included in my Yahoo! Launch music video rotation, otherwise I would never have heard of it. (I suppose that's embarrassingly mainstream by 2004 standards. Next I'll admit finding something on a listening station at Sam Goody.)

Of course, I tried to introduce a friend, and she scoffed. Now she listens to the whole album, regularly, but not because of me!

Dan Hartung | September 24, 2004 4:20 AM | Reply

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