Groove Armada Share The Love

You might despise them for being vastly overplayed and selling their slowed-down-jazz souls to Marks and Spencer in exchange for some Extremely Chocolately Chocolate Chocolate Pudding (I don’t – I know people that do), but you can’t deny that the boys of Groove Armada have oodles of hi-energy musical talent.

Thus, you will all be delighted to hear that they’ve made their new EP available, pre-release, on the internet for the consumption of share-happy rum drinkers. Confused? Well basically it goes like this:

Mr Bacardi and Groove Armada sit down for a chat. Mr Bacardi explains that his company, the globally-renowned rum manufacturer Bacardi, is setting up B-Live Share, an online platform for people to share music and discover new artists. Or something. What Bacardi needs is a high-profile artist to launch the whole affair. An artist willing to allow their new material to be made available exclusively on B-Live Share, thus encouraging people to join the site and share it with as many of their friends as possible. The more friends they share it with, the more tracks they can download. Groove Armada eye the briefcase of money that Mr Bacardi has placed on the table and is now fondling delicately with a wee glint in his eye, and chime in unison, “Sign me uuuuuppp!”

Slight amount of artistic license there – in reality the main thing Groove Armada get out of this is publicity, as well as a way of having some kind of control over how their music is shared by people online. The mp3s are in DRM-free format however, so obviously some of the tracks have ended up on naughty bloggers’ sites. The divils!

There are four tracks on the EP (Go, El Padrino, Pull Up (Crank It Up), and Drop The Tough), with a tiered system determining how each track is shared. The hardest track to get is Drop The Tough (remixes by The Twelves and Van She are floating around on Hype Machine) which requires each B-Live Share user to share with 2,000 friends before he or she can access the song.

There’s some kind of staggering process as well, whereby people that you shared with who then share the track give points to you because you shared with them, then when the people that you shared with who then shared the track who share the track get points, they share the track and… points… umm… such as, North Korea… The staggering thing hurts my head a bit really. Share, get points. That’s it in a nutshell.

If any of you want to get your hands on the EP, you can access B-Live Share here and get your hands on the first track, Go. No prizes for guessing whose account you’ll be doing that through… I’m shameless, I know.