redfishingboat

Listen while you read: “The Compromise” - The Format

Remember when The Force let Anakin Skywalker down? He was totally all into learning The Force and being a good guy, and then Natalie Portman died anyway? He trusted in The Force and believed it would help him out, but it didn’t so … well you know what happened. Vader happened!

Well, I just found out that The Format broke up! Never mind that they broke up in February (oops). So yeah, I only went to their Myspace like once every six months. Did Stereogum even cover this? Trust me they were one of my favorite jangle pop bands ever! Really, they were! The melodies on the 2006 album Dog Problems were some of my all time favorite. Now they’re gone. Sam and Nate have gone their separate ways.
And, I blame The Force!

In this story, The Force is Web 2.0 or New Media or whatever you want to call it. Myspace and iTunes and muxtape and imeem and Pandora and the Long Tail were supposed to guarantee that hardworking indie bands with limited audiences would be taken care of! Hundreds of thousands of fans were supposed to hear them and say “Oh I’m totally going to spend money on this instead of Call of Duty 4 or Sin City on blu-ray.” They were supposed to make a million dollars! Because they’re totally way better than Fall Out Boy and stupid rappers and if only everybody had a chance to hear them, then tons of people would totally pay lots of money for their music! The Format even gave away an album for free! How 2.0 of them! And, The New Long Social Force 2.0 let me down, and now The Format is dead.

Yeah right.

Truth is, bands like The Format are (were) exactly as popular as they’re supposed to be and no amount of technical ingenuity is going to help them. At one point, I believed in building these cool tools that made technology irrelevant to the distribution of music to the people who consumed and paid for it. It’s where I guided my career. But, I think those problems are pretty much solved now. A band like The Format can produce a single, they can get it on iTunes and distribute their music to a worldwide audience and they can build connections with fans around the globe on Myspace. Then, they go out and play live and build a base. That’s really the end of the story. No amount of recommending it to someone who likes Linkin Park is going to change the bottom line. People like what they like. A lot of people like “popular crap” for a variety of completely valid reasons that have nothing to do with injecting marketing into the social graph.

But, there are acres of pixels devoted to that contentious issue. I’ll never convince the True Believers that people don’t actually want more music choices. So no, I’m not going all Darth Vader on anyone – that’s Andrew Keen’s gig now. I really just wanted to write a blog post about demise of The Format.

Oh, but also the new band Fun (http://www.myspace.com/fun) featuring Nate from The Format – a guy whose talent and writing I really connect with. They just posted a demo on their Myspace page, one that really makes me happy. I’ll add them as a friend and keep an eye out for when they’ll release more. I’ll probably really love it, but I won’t expect technology –- despite the billions of dollars changing hands on social media startups — to make the band any real money.

Addendum - more of my favorite tracks:

“Time Bomb”

“I’m Ready, I Am”

“I’m Actual”