Ex-Fleet Foxes member and overly witty performer Father John Misty has his sophomore album coming out February 10 via Sub Pop. The album, titled I Love You, Honeybear, is full of tongue-in-cheek song titles like “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)” and “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.” With its release date on the horizon, Josh Tillman has launched a brand new website for fans to stream the album early — with a catch.
The website is called Streamline Audio Protocol (aka SAP). It’s a fake “streaming service” that he’s been “developing” specifically to answer questions fans and musicians run into: Why does this album cost so much? What if I don’t like it? Why can’t I stream it for free? In a statement on the site, he explains how this streaming service fixes the problem:
I am pleased to introduce SAP, a new signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are “sapped” of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere and other distracting affectations so the consumer can decide quickly and efficiently whether they like a musical composition, based strictly on its formal attributes, enough to spend money on it. SAP files sound incredible when compressed and streamed at low resolutions over any laptop speaker or cell phone. They are cheap to produce and take up even less space than the average MP3. They contain just enough meta-data to be recognized by sophisticated genre aggregation software. Everything you love about discovering and sharing free music, minus the cost to anyone: artist or fan.
Click here to stream his album. If you like the low quality tunes without vocals and other essential parts, shoot him a message at the bottom to talk about the joys of “discoverness, freedoming, or sharehood.” Or, you know, go buy his album here.