Disquiet

The marketing of Moby‘s forthcoming album, Hotel, due out next Tuesday, continues apace. First up was an innovative if unnecessarily amusical medley of samples, featured for free on the iTunes Music Store (Disquiet’s Downstream entry on February 22). With a spoken introduction by Moby himself, that track sounded a bit like the digital-music trend of the moment, the podcast. Now there’s a promotional MP3 up on amazon.com‘s “free downloads” page that takes its cue from a more old-school recording trend: it’s listed as an “Exclusive B-side.” The track is titled “Quiet Pianos,” its release dated February 17, and it’s quickly established itself at the top of the Amazon downloads chart. For all its popularity, or perhaps because of its popularity, the actual act of downloading hasn’t been entirely smooth; some computers end up not with the 6MB file, but with a 5KB placeholder. To get to it, find the “free downloads” tab on the site’s “music” page, or search for “Quiet Pianos.” In related news, moby.com has been redesigned, as Moby noted in his journal yesterday (dateline: Milan).

By Marc Weidenbaum