Swedish Band The Ark Releases New CD as a Magazine

Over the past decade or so, the CD market has suffered, to say the least. While most other bands have thus opted to market their music on the Internet, Sweden's The Ark have decided to release their upcoming album in the form of another old school medium--a paper magazine publication. In an interview with TechDirt, The Ark's manager, Jon Gray, explained the motivation behind selling the group's album for about $13 as a publication, with a cardboard sleeve holding the paper and the CD itself. As Gray says, "For many in the younger generation, music is something that's for free. The idea is to work with another form of packaging, to raise other values around the music. The genius is not the idea, but implementation. That we took this from start to finish." Gray went on to say that "rather than get 4 separate texts stuffed together on a 12x12 cm cd booklet page, here each text has its own full page. It's almost a return to the LP format."

Gray also seems optimistic that his new packaging approach will be adopted by others in the music industry. "Whether it's digital downloads or Spotify. There is no money yet," Gray says. "If we become the best selling album in 2010 and the best-selling monthly magazine ever, as I believe we will, it's obvious to me that others will follow our example."