Image from gorillaz.com.

Ey Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

As some of you may recall, when the Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach came out earlier this year, I was a pretty big fan. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the highest rated album that we’ve reviewed on site, and given the randomness of the musical styles we tend to cover from time to time, that’s pretty high praise.

However, being a great artist and an having great albums doesn’t prevent you from sometimes doing things that could be considered questionable by your fanbase. Just take a look at Marilyn Manson for instance. While some artists, such as him, could argue that they’ve made it a career by pissing everyone off—their fans included—I’m not sure if Gorillaz’ mastermind Damon Albarn (also leader of much-ballyhooed Britpop pioneers Blur) is really in the same sort of position.

Long story short, for Christmas this year, the virtual band has been doing a play on the Christmas advent calendar, each day unearthing something new for fans (desktop backdrops, photos, online minigames similar to the ones from Plastic Beach, etc…) to have and download or look at or whatever they do when they find cool stuff on the internet.

About halfway through the month, band co-creator Jamie Hewlett revealed that the climactic moment of this calendar was going to be the release of The Fall, an album that Albarn had been reportedly working on while on the road during October. The big headline grabbing aspect of it was the fact that he did the thing almost entirely on an iPad, using many of the device’s many music and sound production applications.

“I’ve made it on an iPad – I hope I’ll be making the first record on an iPad,” he said. “I fell in love with my iPad as soon as I got it, so I’ve made a completely different kind of record,” Albarn said. After reading an explanation like that, it almost comes off like a commercial for Apple, but I’ll hold off on calling bullshit just yet.

His reasoning for rushing it out the door even makes sense. Given the volatile nature of the internet community, a lot of artists almost fear that your word is sometimes tested by your ability to stick to your guns, and that’s pretty much what he did. Unfortunately, some may argue that this worked to the detriment of the final product of The Fall, but for all intents and purposes, that wasn’t the point. The point was to make something on the road, with no blueprints, guidelines or producers; just creating music for music’s sake.

“I literally made it on the road in America over a month. I didn’t write it before; I didn’t prepare it. I just did it day by day as a kind of diary of my experience in America,” told Billboard. “If I left it until the New Year to release it, then the cynics out there would say, ‘Oh well, it’s been tampered with.’ But if I put it out now, they’d know that I haven’t done anything because I’ve been on tour ever since.”

This is where the story gets a little murkier though. Because, on Christmas day, I’m sure I wasn’t one of the only people that didn’t notice that you had to be a member of their fanclub, Gorillaz Sub Division, in order to be able to actually download the damn thing. And membership cost $45. Hell, the first place I even read the fact that The Fall was dropping on Christmas was over at Antiquiet, and there wasn’t even a mention of the necessary fanclub membership until after it came out—in the comments section.

Now I understand that that’s one of those little details that obviously wasn’t publicized for very specific reasons, but it’s one of those things that would have probably allowed me to not get my hopes up as much. Fortunately, the album is available streaming on their website if you give them your name and your email, but it was kind of a buzzkill to wake up on Christmas morning—I literally did that—to go to their site and be greeted with the page that says you can either listen to it or join their fanclub, which after clicking tells you of its $45 cost, if you want to have it at your disposal.

Current front page of gorillaz.com.

This isn’t a mere case of me complaining about not getting music for free, either; I would have gladly paid typical price for a retail release if that’s what they were asking. I wouldn’t even have complained if non-members had to pay while members got it for free, as many fanclubs for all sorts of things in this case do special things for their fans. It just seemed like a bit of a bait-and-switch in the way the whole thing was marketed.

And like I said, I might have just not done my research well enough originally, but in a day and age where more and more artists are allowing their music be available for their fans at more reasonable prices—or free, for that matter—this seems like milking them for everything that they’re worth. I like the Gorillaz and really appreciate everything that they’ve releases to some varying degree, but I certainly don’t like them enough to join a fanclub, especially at that entry rate. Does that mean I’m not really a fan? No, but it does mean that I have my boundaries, and those pretty much end when the music stops playing.

With the music industry pretty much becoming a non-entity from the business side of things, artists—especially ones who can manage to sit behind cartoon avatars and still maintain the notoriety of first class pop artists—should be doing more to ensure the survival of their art. But who knows, maybe this is a timed release, and a few months down the line it’ll see it’s own public release of some sort, but for now, I can’t really say that I’m too thrilled to be tied to my desk just to listen to some new music from them, regardless of how great it may be. And from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty good.

Front page image from antiquiet.com.