Free-as-in-beer music redux

About a year ago, a Seattle-based band named Harvey Danger released their latest album, "Little By Little", and made headlines by making the entire album available in MP3 format on their website for free. I'd never heard of the band, but I figured the price was right, and I could just delete the files if I decided it sucked. (I even blogged about it.) Well, it didn't suck, and I grew to quite like the album. A month ago, I decided that I liked it enough to actually purchase it, since I felt kind of guilty that I was enjoying listening to this album, while the band was getting no benefit from my enjoyment. So I went to the web site, entered my address and credit card number, and got an error, saying that my zip code was in the wrong format. Well, Canadian addresses don't have a zip code, they have a postal code, in a different format than US zip codes. Yet another US-based web site that doesn't know that people exist outside of the US. Sigh.

Anyway, I emailed the "webstore" address asking if they could confirm that either (a) my credit card was not charged, or (b) it was, but the CD will be sent to me. I never heard back, and promptly forgot all about it.

Yesterday, I received my credit card bill, and lo and behold, there is a charge for US$19, and I have no CD. I emailed them again, stating that I was charged, so could they please send the CD? This morning I got a reply, saying that the CD was sent last weekend, and if I don't receive it soon to let them know. The funny part was that the email was sent by Jeff J. Lin (Note: inactive blog), who happens to be the guitar player for Harvey Danger. You know you're not dealing with a big-name band when the guitar player is also responsible for shipping. You wouldn't send email to u2.com and expect to get a reply from theedge@u2.com. After reading some of the stuff on his rather sparsely-populated blog, it looks like he's a geek like me (he specifically mentioned "my CS profs" in one entry), so he's probably "the website guy" as well as the guitar player.

Anyway, I thought that was cool. I encourage you to go and check out this album, if you like their style of music. I'm not sure how to describe "their style of music" though, other than to say that they have been described as "college/alternative". You can hear short clips of a couple of their songs from their Wikipedia page.