“It’s no longer a question of ‘if’ the album is going to leak, it’s ‘when’ is the album going to leak,” says keyboardist and percussionist Chris Freeman.
That’s why many a band has found creative ways to take control of our leaky culture — either by setting up Facebook Like walls, as J-Lo did, or streaming entire albums on their websites following leaks, like The Beastie Boys. Manchester Orchestra is the latest addition to the creative release canon.
The indie rock band will release its third album, Simple Math, via Favorite Gentlemen/Columbia Re cords on May 10, but fans will be able to check out a stream Monday — starting at 12 p.m. EST — at TheManchesterOrchestra.com. However, there’s a catch — in order to access the jams, folks will have to “unlock” the album by dragging and dropping five of 10 puzzle pieces into the right positions. The puzzle reflects the geometric quality of the album art, and each song is associated with a different shape — so users will have to put songs in the correct track listing order to unlock the jams.
To help users beat the game, the band has given “cheat codes” to a bunch of websites, including us. Check it out at the bottom of the page. Other sites with codes will be listed on the stream’s website.
The puzzle was created using Soundcloud’s “Premiere” Javascript API, along with JQuery’s UI component classes. The player will be hidden until all the pieces are arranged in the correct order.< /p>
“The album is...
