Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

April 1, 2009

By Fortuna Köln

French band Phoenix have a new album out on May 25th entitled Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. After 2006′s amazing It’s Never Been Like That who wouldn’t be anticipating this? Some people were so excited about the album that it was leaked onto the internet early (shocking, I know). Unlike some artists, however, Phoenix actually had a tactful, rational response.

In a post on the band’s official forums the band said:

Hope all is well as we roll into another weekend. We obviously couldn’t help noticing that the record has leaked early and that some of you have already heard it.
We’re happy to hear everybody is enjoying the tracks. Obviously, we would have preferred it not to get out so early (every act likes to be able to present their music in the desired fashion as i’m sure you all appreciate) but we’re glad that it’s being so well received.

We know some people download music as they can’t afford to buy every CD they’d like to own (these are tough economic times after all) and we’re not mad at you if that is the case, it doesn’t make you any less important to us. We genuinely value all the support you give us and would rather you downloaded it for free than didn’t listen at all.
If you do download it from P2P and enjoy it then check out the deluxe edition when it is released properly. We’re going to load it up with special additional content to try to make it real value for money, it should make for a nice little package for those of you that like to have something physical. Hopefully there will be some nice extra tracks and a dvd to accompany the record.

We’re also working on a nice super ltd edition package which we will be selling for a short time via our new webshop.
One thing we did want to point out is that the version that has leaked is not a finished mastered version and contains slightly different versions of several tracks to the ones which will be on the final album. The audio quality will also be much improved by the mastering process.

It’s a shame as the band really wanted to make sure everybody heard the final, fully realised version of the record but in the event that you do listen to the leaked version please bear this in mind.

I think it would be pretty difficult to write a better response. What a world of difference it makes when you don’t take an adversarial stance with your fans.

As if they weren’t nice enough already, you can download the first single “1901″ from the band’s website. Or, if you are too lazy for that, you can watch it here: