On Friday, May 3, Raagaverse -- a four-piece band led by vocalist Shruti Ramani with Noah Franche-Nolan, Jodi Proznick, and Nicholas Bracewell -- released their first album, Jaya, on Bandcamp as a digital album.
Their release concert is tonight at the Fox Cabaret, the same venue where I heard their first-ever show.
But on streaming, as of today, only the three singles from the album are available.
You can call this a windowed release; I'm doing one too!
Other folks are crafting release windows as well. I remember Allison Au doing it from October (Bandcamp) to December (streaming) at the end of 2023.
There's also still an album from my previous job where the artist has kept a "limited version" on streaming with only a few tracks, a year-ish out. And Dean Thiessen has opened up his Stranger Friends album to streaming after three years!
The concept is straightforward: encourage some extra direct sales by making it only available for real money, for a long enough time that you can market that concept to your people. The jury's out on how well it works; when I looked on Monday, May 6, Jaya had been added to five Bandcamp collections at a minimum price of $10.
But what's most curious about Raagaverse's window is that they don't even have the CDs for sale yet. Usually the windowing method supports physical album sales. Are they selling those only at their shows, like last month's two-nighter at the Kay Meek Centre and tonight's release show -- a window within a window? They have a jazzfest show as well in late June. We'll see how their window opens from here.