What you see in the series of posts about Victorian mother songs on the blog for my own music is the realization of an idea about music packaging on the internet. I had a song to deliver, and I wanted to use packaging to give it a better chance in the world.
So I wrote up the context.
In the first post I described the genre as a whole, and included an MP3 of a parody of the song to show what the music sounded like. In the second post I described the music I learned from and included an MP3 of that recording. In the third post I put up interactive supplies — lyrics, chord charts, and sheet music — to help people have a direct interaction with the tune on a musical level. And in the fourth post, when I finally released my own recording, I also did notes about the recording process.
If you think about this in terms of digital music packaging, I didn’t try to replicate the specific doodads that come with a physical CD or vinyl record. There’s no one piece of album art, there’s no booklet, there’s no place in the series where you can say “this is it.” What there is instead is everything and anything I could find that would develop the music. What I didn’t want was a measly scrawny little MP3 file. What I did want was a human experience carrying meaning and emotion.
I think it’s important to have words, images, and ideas to accompany the music. It takes the music from a bare reed and places it into a lush garden.