Ballet of Trucks now available for download

http://lo-boy.net
http://lo-boy.bandcamp.com

Ballet of Trucks was originally released in 2003.

Now it’s available in all your favorite digital formats.

Like Radiohead and Saul Williams, we let you name your price or no price at all. If you download, we will take your email address and notify you when our second album comes out sometime in 2009 or 2010. (All revenues will go toward mastering our second record; or, a Montreal bagel or some smoked meat for Mike when he gets here for the final mixing, whichever seems most appropriate).

The Backstory

In 2003, my band lo-boy released our first CD Ballet of Trucks. As is usually the case with indy bands, we had a small run of discs we never sold out. I was responsible for our small web presence and never bothered with MySpace, since I didn’t like the site or its intellectual property policies (though I have always checked out bands there).

I had planned to get the lo-boy tracks up on our own site but never got around to figuring out a good interface to do it. Then recently I was tipped off on the TapeOp boards to bandcamp.com, which is more or less like WordPress for musicians, complete with creative commons options for licensing. The template is simple, there are lots of format options for users, and you can charge or not charge as you like (we chose “pay what you want”), though you and the buyer both need PayPal accounts. The site is still new and evolving (one could imagine, for instance, full interace customization like any other CMS and full band webhosting possibilities). Uploading the full .aiff files took some time but was worth it. On first try, their streaming mp3 encoder couldn’t handle all the low-end but it seemed to resolve itself a couple days later — they stream at 128k mp3 and are looking into higher bitrates. But they seem to really know what they are doing, customer service is great, and so is search engine optimization. Of course, we could get into the iTunes store for $30 a year too.

Speaking of which, the plan is to finally finish mixing our STILL untitled second CD this summer. Which is good because right about now is the 5th anniversary of the date we finished recording the tracks in Pittsburgh.