Customer Reviews

Barenaked On A Stick

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Barenaked Ladies has stepped up, leading the pack in the 'find a new way to deliver music to fans' game. A few artists have released music on flash memory sticks, but none has delivered it on something that could be directly plugged into one's computer, thus creating annoying extra steps for me, the consumer. Enter BNL - a band who could always play better, write better tunes, and be just plain more fun than most bands, when they weren't even trying. Enter Barenaked On A Stick - the first USB Flash Drive music piece.

BNL are offering up 28 songs (half holiday and half really great live tracks from different shows across the globe), video snippets, photos, buddy icons, and more... and for just a bit more than the 128MB USB Flash Drive would cost on its own. AND... I didn't even have to do anything to make it work. I opened the package, popped off the lid, plugged it in, and downloaded the contents. There I was; awash in all the fun BNL had to offer me. No annoying record company warnings (as this comes directly from the band's own label), no annoying restrictions of the content. Just good tunes and cool video snips.

While so many music companies are making the use of music MORE difficult for listeners, BNL comes out with a way to make it LESS difficult and more economical. Cost=$30;Value of stick=$25;29 songs=$5. I hope they sell all they can produce and I applaud the courage of the band and Nettwerk for the idea.

I don't have this Barenaked stick as yet, but I already own the Barenaked for the Holidays album, and it's an awesome one at that. Needless to say I still plan on getting this memory key, for all the extras and then to use it to hold my documents and things. After all, it's branded with BNL style, and what fan wouldn't want a fun AND functional item? Although harder to get in Canada it seems, for US folks it's a reasonable price for a USB key with lots of cool BNL stuff, including a full album. Other artist have much more expensive items for fans (U2 branded iPod, for instance). I must give 5 stars to my hometown band for this cool little device.

How much would it cost if you bought every song via iTunes?

hint: (x * $0.99) {about the same price}

The compression factor - for sound quality - you can have as a valid argument.

What you're missing out on is the value as a "Collector's Item".

Were there no eBay and no Amazon and you bought one, imagine what it would be worth in a few years.

And you have to give them something for the creative effort.

Think of it like the charity golf tournaments where they give a car away for a hole-in-one on the seventeenth hole (or whatever hole is the most difficult on that particular course). The news jumps all over it. (they take out an insurance policy, of course).

hint: It's called free publicity.


The reason the compression is the way it is is looking at how much would fit on a stick of a particular size and balance the price, manufacturing, packaging, etc.

The first of anything is usually (not always) the most expensive.

Why would anyone want to pay $35-ish for compressed versions of teh songs? 128MB isn't very much, and for it to fit almost 30 songs, along with video and everything else, surely the songs must only be playing at about 128k quality? Compare that to the quality you get from a CD, which is around 320k. It seems to me that this is a bit of a rip-off...