In full megalomaniacal rock-star rebellion, New Orleans folk-rock and soul band The Shiz marks its epically lackluster 5 year run with a revolutionarily ineffective business model that guffaws in the face of the music industry apocalypse.
Band manager Lilli Lewis, the genius behind the new model says “given the state of the industry, I thought it best to bring the disaster of the internet driven free-for-all to the live music venue, by denying the current compensation model for original bands in New Orleans, which generally involves being paid a percentage of the bar tab.” This means the bands are compensated based on how completely trashed their audiences get, which in the Crescent City, has no known limits. Still, Lewis feels this is somewhat antithetical to the band’s misguided intentions of “adding value” to the lives of their listeners, and therefore feels compelled not to be compensated along these lines. Needless to say, the band is no longer working beyond the occasional regional county fair or fundraiser.
To further tank the band’s opportunities for success, they have chosen to try to minimize their carbon imprint by pursuing greener methods for sharing their new album “Meet You in the Morning” including youtube, noisetrade, bandcamp, and download cards/stickers, all of which no one in New Orleans seems to have heard. Also, they have chosen to individually hand-wrap the short run of CDs they have had replicated, which include adorably corny 3-D paper dolls of the band members with each copy. Each unit is made almost exclusively of recycled materials, maximizing on the cost per unit ratio. The band believes this to be the most inefficient method of distribution, seeing as how each unit takes well over 10 minutes to assemble, requiring Lewis to cease all other forms of employment to keep production going, while yielding a product fully unsuitable for industry standard retail shelf life.
In related news, the band has chosen not to tour in support of the album, due in part to laziness and lack of vision, but mostly because who in their right mind would tour when gas is pushing $4.00 a gallon? (No really, it’s because they’re damned hippies and every day is Mother’s day when your mom is the Earth.)
The irony of it all is the album is getting great reviews. Soundacious on Amazon.com calls it “two pounds of shiz in a one pound bag” while Amy Rasdall for gogirlsmusic.com writes “What a soulful pleasure to my ears!”
“Meet You in the Morning” is available for download on iTunes, Amazon.com, CDBaby and at BANDCAMP (which is their favorite so they kindly ask you to ignore all the others). Of the album Lewis says “I think it’s pretty good, ya know…I guess… At least I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that it should last the listener much longer than the two Starbucks lattes you’d get for the same price…I mean, it takes 70 minutes just to listen to it the first time ya know? I mean, yeah….”
