Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

Jack White has once again boldly bucked music industry convention. On July 19, 2024, White secretly guerilla-released a new limited-edition, vinyl-only studio solo album through his Third Man Records imprint. The album, simply titled No Name , was distributed only at the Third Man Records stores in Detroit, Nashville, and London as a free item given out with any purchase at the stores. Some copies were randomly sent to Third Man Records Vault members. (I was not one of those members who received it). The number of copies printed and distributed was not disclosed. The album was not initially available from streaming services, but White’s official Reddit page provided a link (now deleted) to a Google Drive featuring various formats of the album for download and distribution. Besides having no name, the album also has no cover art, as it's packaged in a plain white sleeve, with a plain white center label which has "NO NAME" stamped on Side A. It's pressed in natural-colo...

For Record Store Day in 2024, the British alternative band Keane issued a live album titled Live At Paradiso 29.11.04 . Limited to 2,500 vinyl copies, the album documents a concert performed by the band in Amsterdam in late November of 2004, the year in which their debut album Hopes and Fears was released. The double-LP was pressed in one red vinyl disc and one white vinyl disc. During the titular concert at the historic Amsterdam venue, the band performed 11 of the 12 tracks from Hopes and Fears , as well as the non-album B-side "Snowed Under", and two songs ("Nothing In My Way" and "Hamburg Song") which would later be recorded for Keane's 2006 sophomore album Under The Iron Sea . The band did an amazing job of performing the songs live, suggesting that the material had been developed over time. Tom Chaplin's falsetto vocals do not soar quite as high in this live setting as they do on record, but his soft and emotive tenor is still powerful, ...

As someone who remembers the days before the internet was available to the public, I am still often amazed by how much easier it has become to access rare recordings. Once upon a time, if a certain obscure album only had a single pressing of, say, 100 copies, way back in a year like, say, 1971, then there seemed to be little or no possibility of the album ever being obtainable by almost anyone. Before the digital age, physical media was usually the only way to hear such an album -- and what were the odds of getting one's hands on an album as obscure as that? It was highly unlikely that you would find such an album in a record store, and even if you did, why would you have any interest in purchasing a recording that was so unknown? It was equally unlikely that such a record would get played on a radio station, even a hip college station or anything like one, except maybe in the artist's home town. Would homemade cassette tapes have circulated? Probably only within a small commun...