Swedish folk band promoted album by only letting users stream it while in the woods

By Sam Barsanti | May 31, 2015 | 9:23pm

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Swedish folk band promoted album by only letting users stream it while in the woods

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As reported by Rolling Stone, Swedish folk band John Moose has released the folkiest folk album of all time. Well, we can’t speak to the content of the album itself, but the way John Moose previewed the album for its fans is folk as fuck—in the parlance of the underground folk shows we went to in our youth. Through the use of an app that would detect your location with Google Maps, a prospective listener could only hear the album if it was determined that they were deep enough in the woods, thereby ensuring that the its story—which is about a man who abandons society so he can conquer nature— could only be appreciated by brave pioneers who had (temporarily) given up on the concrete hell of city life.

It may seem a bit silly, but it’s certainly clever and it got us to write about a Swedish folk band. Still, musicians cannot sustain themselves by forcing listeners to go into the woods to stream free versions of their album, so John Moose has since released a traditional version that you can listen to while driving a car or burning garbage or whatever. In fact, we can even embed one of the songs in this very article. If you listen to it, though, please at least pretend you’re in the woods.