01/18/10
Text: Nik Mercer
Having that pure a mission statement is key because a lot of sites start tacking on more and more features. Like, you add news and events and interviews and... it's just so important to that one-sentence breakdown. For RCRD LBL it might be, "Exclusive new MP3's delivered daily" or something along those lines.
Right. We started right after the first wave of blogs ended. Brooklyn Vegan was jumping off and Stereogum... it hadn't been acquired yet, but it was about to be. Peter and I, neither of us wanted to be the CNN of underground music and, like, I was reading Pitchfork every day to find out who was touring and who was sleeping with who and what Ryan Adams did last night... but, for us, we just wanted to do something that was really pure and just about free music that's good and legal.
Sticking to your guns like that is admirable because a lot of the time with the Web, you get caught up with the notion that you can keep adding more and more to your core package. It's not like having a magazine where you are confined to, say, 100 pages. Web sites can go on for an infinity and can have boundless add-ons and widgits and features and whatever. Pitchfork is great in that they, too, have stayed so steady over the years. They provide five record reviews, five days of the week. Period. There's news and track reviews and other fun stuff like that, but the brand's cornerstone is the 25-per-week reviews.
And isn't that what you want? There's too much of everything! I mean, I went through a period where I was running the site on a very breakneck schedule, posting up to 13 records a day. It got to the point where it was like, "You know what? It's great that we can do this so we can show people [what we're capable of], but I myself don't have enough time to listen to all this stuff, so how can [the average reader] do it?" So we pared it down to four or five artists per day. Trying to be too exhaustive doesn't benefit anyone.
A lot of the time, I think some of the fault falls on the reader. If you look back to before the Internet―
Woah. I was born in '99, dude.
Well, back then, authors, musicians, and other creative types weren't stressed by some need to continually pump stuff out between book releases and album releases and so on. Now, though, fans demand it and the artists cough up the goods... you make yourself think that your career's on the line because you're not active on a daily basis.
It's true. It's one thing that's a little weird about bands today. You go to see someone who's playing their first or second show and it's already this big deal. I mean, I get it―maybe the band is really awesome. I'm sort of the opinion, though, that some of that will slow down in the next few years. Unfortunately, there's not much room to maneuver [within that system]. Like, if you play a few shows and get "found"... there's not much more to do... and a label won't feel as though they have a stable, set thing to sell to people.
Exactly. A few months ago, I finished Ripped by Greg Kot, one of the WIRED editors. It's good. One of the main points he brings up is that there are so many intrinsic problems with that sort of business model. Like, you look to the past and find all these bands that made it only after they had produced two or three or four albums. They had so much breathing room.
I think that's why producers have been making a lot of interesting music over the past five years or so. Almost all these guys cut their teeth as club DJ's. When I was working at The Fader in 2003, we were covering Hollertronix, which was one of Diplo's first parties with Low Budget. And, like, he was a club DJ! Mark Ronson was a club DJ! A lot of these people making big-hit records these days cut their teeth by figuring out what works musically and what's good [in clubs]. I find that indie bands lack that living-by-your-wit sensibility. It's like, We go into practice and take a couple bong hits and play a show and Brooklyn Vegan or RCRD LBL loves us and plays us for a week, but... [that's] not very process oriented.
Right―and after that spike of fame, what's next?
Well, "famous" is [relative]. Like, how famous is Beirut, really?
Vampire Weekend or something―
But they're great. They deserve it. They knew what they were doing right off the bat.
I agree, but―
I love Vampire Weekend! You can quote me on that.
I love them too, but―
This is a fake argument, by the way. This isn't a real argument. [Laughs]
It's just bizarre to see how dramatically their audience changed between the CD-R album's release and the height of the tour they went on in promotion of the XL Recordings release. At a show in L.A., I was surrounded by bros. I feel like when you approach a band's promotion in that fashion, you wind up convoluting their identity in so many ways.
I mean... but the record doesn't have a bad song on it. They're all cuter. They dress well―and differently from everyone else at the time. To me, that's where music takes on another, much more interesting dimension. That's what makes the Libertines or Vampire Weekend versus some thousand other guys with half-baked ideas and a few guitars.
Oh, man... I miss the Libertines...
I managed to see them three times when they did their first American tour. Unreal. Saw 'em at CBGB's. I was there. [Laughs]
What's your typical relationship with a record label?
Well, we have a very small group of labels that have been with us since launch. Ghostly International, Modular, Warp, and a few others have their own blogs on the site. For the most part, outside of those original 10 or so labels, everything's pretty basic. It's like, "Hey―we like your label and your music. Do you want to do something with us?"
So what's the main sell to them? Your traffic?
Well, I think we're different in that we don't do record review and we only feature stuff that we like, so if something's on RCRD LBL, that means we dig it. Because of that, we're able to co-promote a release in cool and effective ways. We realize that, off the bat, it's in our interest, too, to promote [music we get from all these labels]. That's part of the reason for us having a Facebook and MySpace and Twitter―we send out releases and all through those channels. Labels come to us because we want to work records the same way they want to. Like, if I'm going to do something with Hot Chip, I want to raise as much awareness as possible to, obviously, get people to my site, but also [support them]. Like, no one ever has to roll the dice with us, like... "Alright, I'm going to give this song to RCRD LBL―hopefully they don't pan it." That's why we're so strict about rejecting stuff.
The review is―
The fact that you see it on the site. Implicitly, it [indicates] the song's worth your time and that it's good. There's no, like, "Well, track five is kind of weak... "
What are your thoughts on streaming versus downloading?
My only thought is that people want to put their tunes on their iPods. That's the way that most people interact with their music nowadays. Even in the digital era, I personally don't use any streaming services. That's not the way that I enjoy music. I'm much more [likely] to get something on Beatport or iTunes or eMusic than I am to subscribe to some service where I can stream a bunch of stuff. People like to own stuff, and, like, I love having a [digital] music collection. It's not the same as when I had rare 12"s, but I think it's awesome when someone asks you to come over and to bring your hard dive as well. That's how people want to interact with music. I've always felt that ownership of music―regardless of whether you've paid for it or not―is important. To have something that you can have and do what you want with is still ingrained in people's minds. I don't think the day will come that people will say, "You know what? I don't even want to have this hard drive," and, like queue up a bunch of streams. Think about it―on the subway... in your car... going to the gym―these are all ways that people interact with music, and I think that, despite some advances in mobile technologies, [streaming] isn't a great experience. People want to have stuff. People like stuff.
You feel like a participant. When you're streaming stuff, you don't feel as though you're really interacting with what's on the other end.
People just either want to have music on their hard drive to claim ownership or whatever... or they want to have it to put on a play list or run it through GarageBand to [mess around with] or something. We've always tried to make RCRD LBL run in line with the way we saw things going [in the music world].
One of the things that nice about the online space is that you need to be really thoughtful about what your audience wants because they're going to respond very quickly about whether they like something or not. That's why we have this curatorial sort of roll. Like, there's a big difference between my version of what's great versus "how do we serve this audience with the most relevant, interest stuff all the time?" When you step back from the world of editors and DJ's and whatever, you realize that not everything is as exposed as you think. It's good to see people that have been at it for a while finally blow up.
