Singled out Mercury Rev's big Internet gamble BY MAC RANDALL
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I still haven’t forgotten that chilly October afternoon in 1984 when I strolled into Harvard Square with a firm goal in mind: to pick up U2’s The Unforgettable Fire on the day of its release. I walked into Discount Records on JFK Street, now long gone, and caught my first glimpse of that hazy black-and-white cover photo of an Irish castle covered in ivy and set off by luxurious maroon-and-gold borders. I took one copy of the record — yes, it was a record, of the 12-inch, 33-1/3 vinyl variety — off the rack, held it in my hands, and examined it for a few moments, paying special attention to the lyrics for "A Sort of Homecoming," which were printed on the back cover. Then I plunked down my money (eight bucks, I think) and raced home.

My anticipation for The Unforgettable Fire had been growing for weeks as I listened to the first single, "Pride (In the Name of Love)," in heavy rotation on the radio. But I had no clue as to what the rest of the album sounded like. Thinking back now, recalling how I watched the label in the center of the record spinning around on my turntable that afternoon and how the emotional intensity of "Bad" blew my 12-year-old mind, I’d have to say that the mystery, the not knowing what I was getting myself into, was a big part of the thrill.

It would be wrong to suggest that kind of mystery has disappeared from today’s pop culture. But there’s no question that in 2005, many people’s first-time experiences of music are far different from my Unforgettable Fire story. Over the last five years, new Web-related technologies — audio streaming, digital downloads, and file-sharing, to name three — have revolutionized the way songs are heard and purchased (or "stolen," as the case may be). Old fogies can gripe about the absence of a physical product, but as the proliferation of music subscription services and the stunning success of Apple’s iPod demonstrate, the world has changed for good, and the moneymen are catching on. The question is, what’s the world changing into? In other words, when fans of the future hear their favorite band’s new album for the first time, how will they be hearing it?

One possible answer to that question is in its testing phase, thanks to Mercury Rev and their record label, V2, which is releasing the band’s new The Secret Migration. The album is pretty much what you’d expect from a group who’ve been upstate New York’s leading purveyor of sprawling, symphonic rock for the past 15 years. Electric and acoustic guitars form ornate sonic tapestries, drums resound with Spectorian authority, distant theremins wail, and Jonathan Donahue’s high, homely voice adds a touch of human frailty. What has changed over time, especially since their 1998 breakthrough, Deserter’s Songs, is the prevailing mood. The dark density of their earlier albums has been replaced by a more open, hopeful sound. And this seems to be reflected in the new lyrics, which dwell on the passing of the seasons. The brief, mantra-like "Moving On" expresses it with a massed choir of decidedly unironic voices: "It will be better in the sun/Just move ahead, it won’t be long."

The CD won’t reach stores till May 17. But on January 25, an EP with selections from the disc went on sale on the Web through iTunes. Six weeks later, another EP with a different set of Secret Migration songs went on sale as the first EP was pulled from iTunes. The process repeated again six weeks later, with a third EP replacing the second. Once the album goes on sale in stores, all of the songs will again be for sale on-line, but the EP configurations will be a thing of the past. (Unless, of course, you want to program them into your iPod that way.) More to the point, every song on the CD will have been made available to the public well in advance of the "release date."

This isn’t the first time a label has put an artist’s music on-line before the "official" release. Warner Bros. did that last year with the entirety of the Secret Machines’ Now Here Is Nowhere. And quirky Russian piano gal Regina Spektor’s debut, Soviet Kitsch, could be legally downloaded months before Sire put it out. But the way Mercury Rev and V2 have gone about releasing The Secret Migration, doling out the songs in several small doses, creating an aura of limited-edition collectibility, is unprecedented. It’s clear that both label and band want to explore what’s possible in the digital domain and how it can work to their benefit. The goal — moving units — hasn’t changed. Their strategy — building fan anticipation — is delightfully old-fashioned. But the methods and the technology are new.

Jeff Mercel, who used to be Mercury Rev’s drummer but has now switched to keyboards, explains that the impetus for this pre-release campaign came from the simple truth that the band are more popular in Britain than in the US. "It’s a different ballgame in America in terms of how new music is accepted. It’s not easy. What’s made it even more difficult is that our past couple of records were released everywhere within the same two-week period. That means everybody wants you to be available to play a show in their country at the same time, and you can’t be in three places at once. So we decided to split up the release dates for various territories, to buy ourselves a little extra set-up time here."

V2 agreed to put The Secret Migration out in Britain in January, making British fans happy, while holding the American release until the more advantageous spring months. The drawback to this approach was the danger it posed to US domestic sales. As V2 marketing director Dan Cohen puts it, "I’m a diehard Mercury Rev fan and I’m going to go buy the British import. How do we make sure I don’t?"

Cohen and his colleagues decided the problem could be solved digitally, and the band seconded the idea. "Early on," Mercel recalls, "we were vocal about doing something with iTunes. The model of distribution is changing permanently and there’s no escaping that, so you might as well get involved."

The marketers’ initial idea, to put the entire album on-line early, was shot down by V2’s sales department. No one is claiming exclusive credit for the three-EP concept, but it seems tailor-made for the completists who make up a big part of Mercury Rev’s fan base. V2 is trying to sweeten the deal for obsessive fans by releasing a limited two-disc edition of the album in May as the band hit the road (they’ll arrive at Boston's Avalon nightclub on May 18), e-mailing two exclusive MP3 tracks to customers who’ve bought the album in stores, and handing out, in lieu of promotional flyers, a series of CD slipcovers featuring the cover art and track listings for each of the three iTunes EPs. Stick a home-burned disc in there and you’ve got an instant collector’s item.

"I think it’s a smart idea," says Nathan Brackett, senior editor at Rolling Stone. "It’s good for the fans and it’s a great promotional tool that doesn’t cost the label very much. There’s a danger that it could make the release of the album an anticlimax — it might have worked better to just release a couple of tracks as a teaser. But it’s another sign that record labels are taking a less antagonistic view of the Internet."

V2 is, of course, taking a risk by releasing The Secret Migration this way. But the latest industry numbers suggest that risk is warranted. In 2004, the number of digital music downloads in the United States went up some 400 percent — and CD sales also went up, for the first time in several years. Granted, that uptick was modest, about two percent, but it counters the claim that digital downloading is killing the music business. Maybe the two can coexist, and maybe, just maybe, digital downloading can actually help the music business.

So far, according to Dan Cohen, the iTunes EPs’ sales figures are "good but not astounding. My head of sales hates when I say this, but the greatest thing that could happen is that there are so many MP3s circulating on-line that we’re like, ‘Oh God, this might hurt sales.’ It hasn’t happened yet."

One thing is sure: as the digital revolution continues to make the music industry’s fault lines rumble, some cherished concepts will get broken. By now, you’ve heard that the album as we know it is on the way out. Mercel doesn’t quite believe it, but you can hear the regret in his voice when he says, "We grew up with 40-minute vinyl records, and we spend our time putting albums together so they can be enjoyed as albums in the classic sense. Maybe that notion is outdated. Now, because it’s so easy to pick the song you want on-line, everything’s become single-oriented. But I think people will start longing for the bigger picture again."

Another candidate for obsolescence is the very thing that fueled my own U2 epiphany: the notion that an artist’s new work gets released on a specific day. "I can remember the street dates for a lot of my favorite records," Cohen says, "but there’s no such thing as a street date anymore."

The passing of these cultural touchstones can make a person nostalgic. They can also fire enthusiasm for what may be on the horizon. Count Brackett among the optimists. "If I were collecting a beautiful series of actual Mercury Rev EPs in nice packages instead of downloading an album in chunks, yeah, I’d definitely be more excited. But in the iTunes world, you can record a song and almost immediately get international marketing, promotion, and distribution. You couldn’t do that with the old music-business model. That’s what’s really exciting."

Mercury Rev headline Avalon, 15 Lansdowne Street in Boston, on Wednesday May 18; call (617) 228-6000.