Statement on the Yield events

A Statement from Josh 12/12/97 9pm

  The recent publicity has been nothing but exciting, however I feel some things need to be cleared up. I encourage anyone with questions and especially those of the media or music industry (along with everyone else) to read this, especially the updates at the bottom.
  What happenned: About a month ago many of us found out through the Pearl Jam Rumor Pit that Pearl Jam will be coming out with a new album, entitled Yield. Its first single, Given to Fly, was supposed to hit radio stations in late December (12/22). As soon as I returned from Thanksgiving break, two recordings of Given to Fly were uploaded, both recorded from radio stations. I quickly discovered that radio stations across the country were playing the incredible new song--before its official release.
  My local radio stations did not seem to be playing Given to Fly, so I was very happy to hear it. I posted the two versions on my site to share with others (As they were unreleased, as are many other songs in my Studio section, I had no problem with this; when it was finally released the song would be removed).
  On Wednesday afternoon (12/3), I recieved an email saying KROCK (WKRL, WKRH, and WKLL; 100.9, 106.5, and 97.7 FM), one of the Syracuse rock stations, was playing all the tracks of Yield throughout the day. Once I finished classes Wednesday evening, I attached my computer to my stereo and waited attentively for the station to play a song. Meanwhile, I chatted with other Pearl Jam fans in IRC (on channel #pearljam in EFFnet and Undernet). At 4pm, the first song, Pilate, was played and I was thrilled to have caught it so it could be shared with the other fans with whom I was chatting with. I quickly edited and encoded (converting into .mp3 format) the song, and it was on my site ready for download by 4:30pm. In the next few hours Lowlight and In Hiding followed (I also caught Given to Fly, but didn't bother since it was already there).
  My site was reasonably busy that night, and Thursday was a record day for hits. Meanwhile, Thursday morning (12/4), KROCK recieved a call from Epic (as many other stations who only played Given to Fly had), asking them to stop. The station agreed to stop if Epic allowed them to give away 25 copies of the album (when it was released). So, the station was allowed to brag for another day, giving away a copy every hour of an album that wasn't even out yet.
  I was extremely happy to be providing fans, for the first time, clips of songs that they have never experienced before. I could hardly keep up with the positive feedback. Many will note that I have a policy of not posting songs from the albums, to encourage people to buy the albums, and to discourage the majority of .mp3 downloaders, who simply download entire CDs and never purchase them. I made an exception for a few reasons. The clips were not full length (except for Given to Fly), they were not CD Quality (they were noticably recorded off the radio, some were not even stereo), and they all had the DJs in them. No one would keep these in place of the real thing; they served as an excellent preview of what was to come and only encouraged people to buy the album. As with all of my music, I knew I would remove them immediately if Pearl Jam or the record company, Epic, requested it.
  Friday evening (12/5) I discovered someone had linked directly to my Yield clips (I do not allow linking directly to my files, as no other website would), and after several refusals to remove them, the Yield clips were removed from my site. Several people emailed the person who did this until he finally removed the links Sunday night (12/7), and the clips went back online. In addition, someone sent me two more short clips of songs that night: Faithful and No Way. These were recorded from KROCK on tape, passed through a few people, and finally one person encoded them and immediately sent them to me. I now had studio clips of six songs from Yield, in addition to live recordings of Brain of JFK, Given to Fly, Wish List, Do the Evolution, and MFC (Many Fast Cars), which I had for a few weeks.
  All was back to normal until I was contacted by Chris Nelson of Addicted to Noise, an online rock news web site, Tuesday afternoon (12/9). Wednesday morning (12/10) ATN's excellent article went up, mostly about my site and the preview of the Yield songs. I suspected this small bit of exposure could perhaps get the attention of Epic, so in the back of my head I sort of expected a call. The article did draw attention to daily rock news sites such as Rock News and Rock Daily, which included a small summary of the article as well as a link to my site.
  About 7pm Wednesday evening, as I was just walking in the door from my first final exam, the phone rang. It was Harvey Leads, Senior VP of Epic. We had a pleasant fifteen minute chat, where he noted he also attended Syracuse University. Of course he asked me to remove the studio clips of Yield, and I did so immediately without question. They had been downloadable for five days on my site, and I am sure hundreds of people had already done so.
  Shortly after the phone call Brian McCollum of the Detroit Free Press called to ask a few questions, and they put up a short article Thursday morning (12/11). Thursday morning I got a call from KROCK's morning show asking me to go on live with them ("Cool! Sure, why not?"). They asked me the usual questions (while repeatedly stating they "bring you new music first"). Not an hour later KKDM in Ohio did the same. I had never been on the radio before, this was a neat experience for lack of a better word. Live Daily had an article that morning. Later MTV Online News contacted me, and interviewed me (online). The article on MTV Online News was posted later that night.
  Friday (12/12) emails and calls slowed down a bit. I went on KROCK again in the morning, along with KPNT in St. Louis. At 6:55 pm, MTV News aired and mentioned this whole thing (I haven't seen it).
  Update 12/13 1pm: Additional articles that have appeared include another article from Addicted to Noise on Friday, and Saturday morning (12/13) The Los Angeles Times also had an article on the subject. Although I believe my Yeild clips would only help the sales of the album, it is understandable that Epic would be concerned that they may hurt its sales. Because of the recent publicity, which has done nothing but raised the awareness of Pearl Jam in the media and as a result in the public, I think we can all agree that Yield will probably have even better sales than if none of this ever occured.
  Update 12/17 8am: I figured things had boiled over this past weekend only to find things now way out of hand. I don't know why this has recieved national attention, but it sure does not deserve it. It also does not deserve the twisting and misconceptions the press is putting in. Please, if you are going to report on this at all, email me first for comments. Yesterday the AP newswire sent out an article which has a lot of incorrect statements and sends the wrong ideas. As a result many local papers across the country now have incorrect articles in them which make me look bad. (This is all following an article in USA Today and the Syracuse Post-Standard, as well as making local TV news, on 12/16.) Please understand I am not "in a jam" at all with the record company, only with the media. I am now home for the holidays, and I will not be accepting phone calls; if you need to contact me, I will only be accepting email.
  About the site: Josh Wardell's Pearl Jam .mp3 Archive is hosted on my Macintosh computer in my dorm room at college. I started it in February as I thought it would be a unique idea to have a place for Pearl Jam fans to get rare music easily and for free. The site was created and is still run in the interest of the fans and the band, not myself. Anyone with a decent computer and internet connection can come and get now over two hundred Pearl Jam songs in .mp3 format. This way there is no trouble of the traditional tape trading, while the quality never degrades. It also combats against the illegal sales of bootlegs (Pearl Jam encourages taping of shows and trading them, but it is illegal to sell these bootlegs for money). In additon to not posting any songs from the Pearl Jam albums to encourage people to puchase them, I provide links to Music Boulevard, so the albums can be ordered with a few mouse clicks. Since the posting of the Yield clips, and especially with the publicity, my site has been experiencing about triple its normal load; about 3,000 page hits a day, and about 6 GB transferred a day. As I am leaving for Christmas break this week, the site will be offline until I come back around January 15th. Until then a temporary site will be online.
  About .mp3 files: .mp3, or MPEG-2 layer 3, is an audio compression format that provides revolutionary compression while retaining quality. It allows a normal song, about 60 MB at CD Quality, to be compressed down to a few MB, which makes it much easier to store and transfer on computers. An .mp3 player program is needed to play these files, along with a decently powerful computer. Unfortunately, they have mostly hurt the music industry; Full recordings of almost every CD on the market are available online from servers or trading in IRC channels. Although it is great for previewing a CD before purchasing it, all too many people are simply keeping the files and no longer purchasing the CDs. This of course can hurt the record company and the artist if it occurs enough. However, my site is unique to most of the .mp3 online community. It does not contain recordings of the disks, but instead gives .mp3 a new and intelligent use, to replace bootlegs. Instead of hurting the artist, my site helps them by exposing their live recordings to more people easier, and encouraging more puchasing of their albums.
  Thank you for reading through this huge statement. If you have any more questions or comments, feel free to email me. I would love to get recordings of my radio interviews or MTV mentioning me if anyone has come across any.