Set to head down under next month to play the Splendour In The Grass festival, Leeds’ Kaiser Chiefs have released their new album The Future Is Medieval on their website – but it’s a little bit different to a traditional album – you get to choose the songs that are on it. How does that work, you may well ask. Well, in essence it’s a bespoke album.
You get to pick ten songs from a choice of 20 for which you pay £7.50 – however you choose which songs they are and what order they run in. Fans who head on to their website www.kaiserchiefs.com can listen to one minute snippets of the 20 songs and then are then able to choose which ten they want on their personalised album. Each song is represented by an icon which has a particular significance to the song, ranging from London double decker buses to teddy bears.
Singer Ricky Wilson concedes that while it’s an unusual move, part of the motivation was to do something different to keep the band enthusiastic. He says “Every band on their third, fourth, fifth record, they do interviews and they say it feels like their first, and it’s just something they say because it’s what people want to hear. Then you wake up and you’ve realised that, actually, you’ve gone along with all sorts of things that are maybe not in your best interests.”
The idea behind the album was cooked up in conjunction with hotshot London ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, and sees the band offering fans a HTML code to sell the version of the album on their own websites, which will also see them receive a pound from each copy they sell.
