Musician Sells Music For Naked Selfies, Solves Music Piracy

Bare with us on this one, folks. Though you’ve likely never heard of him, Danish musician Loke Rahbek may have just unknowingly come up with a solution to music piracy. In the lead-up to the release of his latest record, Rahbek requested fans pay for the music with a naked selfie.

The artist released his cassette-only album The Wild Palms under his Croatian Amor moniker over the weekend, and according to FACT, the only way you can get it is to email a full-frontal nude self-portrait directly to Rahbek, with the words ‘The Wild Palms’ appearing somewhere in the image.

“When you share your work with someone… you are stripping naked,” he told the magazine. “So I ask that anyone who gets the music does not share it with anyone. And I promise in return to not share those photos with anyone. They are going to be in a file, and they are going to stay there.”

“I wanted it to be secret, because you know if we’re talking about intimacy, nothing is stronger than keeping secrets together,” he added. Intimacy and secrets notwithstanding, Rahbek may have just figured out a way to stop consumers from purchasing music and then pirating it online for others: get fans to send a naked selfie in exchange for the music and it stays safe as long as the music does.

But Rahbek says he’s not interested in anything of the sort. Instead, the concept for The Wild Palms grew out of his meditations on the relationship between artist and audience. “I’ve been very interested in coming up with ways that this relationship might be made into something more like a communication,” he said. For Rahbek, this is more of an experiment in vulnerability than piracy.

Watch: Loke Rahbek at Home Sweet Home

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