They and their related projects like Death Cab for Cutie are prototypical next generation bands. Somewhere in this equation lies the future off rock. It's ironic or maybe poetic that such a progressive group of musicians named a band after their old school collaborative method. They mailed CD's back and forth through the postal service, but I'm guessing their collaborations don't involve snail mail anymore. Ahh... nostalgia. :)
They've been a great meme to follow because their trail leads straight through stories like this one.
From: Rock's Big Bounce - Newsweek Entertainment - MSNBC.com
"After a grim decade, the rock scene is once again producing music - lots of it - that's worth getting on a plane to hear. And better still, people are buying it. Last month, Seattle bizarro-rockers Modest Mouse turned heads when their new CD debuted at No. 19 on Billboard's album chart, selling 80,000 copies in a week. Gibbard has become such an indie rainmaker that his side project, the electronic-pop duo the Postal Service, has sold 250,000 copies of its first CD, 'Give Up.' 'Five years ago, a record that sold 50,000 copies was a huge success in our world,' says Rich Egan, president of Vagrant Records, home of punk pinups Dashboard Confessional. 'The standard has totally changed.' File-sharing, once thought to be the death knell for the music industry, has actually helped trigger a spending spree. Even MTV and big radio are starting to notice, playing artists they wouldn't have touched three years ago. Does the current scene have a Nirvana, an R.E.M., a U2? Not yet. 'But I've talked about this with friends a lot lately: something amazing is about to happen,' says Gibbard, 27. 'I don't want to guess what it'll be, but you can just feel it coming.'"
So is it working. Is the radical shifting due file sharing, innovative bands and small record labels starting to reinvigorate music. Is podcasting going to have any effect here?
Let's not pat ourselves on the back just yet.
First, the music industry regularly undergoes a revolution every few years. Wether it's hip-hop, gangster rap, grunge or motown, it's always happened. It's all part of the process. When it becomes to much of a big business commodity, just like hair band rock at the beginning of the 90's it gets burned down and recreated. It's sort of a beautiful thing when you think about it.
Second, we're just, just seeing the tip of the iceberg in new business and new media. New business models, new marketplaces, new companies, and new technologies like podcasting are just getting off the ground. Any acknowledgments should wait perhaps 2 more years, then we should really see where this is all going.
I'd just say that articles like this are some of the first signs that yes, there is life after file-sharing for the music industry.
It's been such a long road if you would have told me two years ago anyone was going to ever get in the game I wouldn't have believed you. I was in disbelief that billion dollar companies were set on sitting out digital music like it was a fad. Then sicking their lawyers on the future, and they're still doing it!
Sony didn't even allow mp3's on their players until after last christmas, when everyone from Creative to Apple had taken the entire portable music market-share from them and people like Cory Doctorow and the rest of us were laughing our asses off at their "A-track" players calling them 8-tracks.
All that and Apple is still the only digital music market that's even viable, and the Canadians and the Swiss are still taxing digital music players and/or recordable CD's like innovation and progress is illegal. Like this the current reality we live in isn't reality, like the future and digital music were not here right now and here to stay.
It's a long hard road and it'll continue to be. I just wish the dinosaurs would die already so we can get on living.
I'm sick of listening to the RIAA and their cohorts.
Shut up and die already or get in the f'n game!
We're sick of listening to your bitching and moaning.
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