Ad support conquers the earth

My friend Mielle and I wrote coincidentally/concurrently (and with not-that-eerie-really similarities in title choice) on the Gaslight Anthem last week – she calls them the Tarentinos of pop. Now her blog reminds me to talk about Killola.

Killola are a female-led DIY band who are touring with KRISTEENYOUNG this spring. They released their last record for free via direct ad support; each song begins with a brief skit or commentary by a band member, explaining that it’s sponsored by indie-related companies A and B. If you want the album without the ads, you can buy it, or go fuck yourself, I suppose, though buying it is probably easier.

I’m not particularly fascinated by the distribution and sale of music. Industry stuff is outside my limited mental jurisdiction, but this really begs my interest. The effect of the introductions is both intriguing and catastrophic. It’s impossible to cut the mental wires which would allow me to take meaning from this, a piece of art which literally can’t be separated from an ad (except via half an hour with GarageBand, but the phantom limb lingers on) – the result is a crude exposure of the label system, rather than a challenge to it.

Killola – All Of My Idols Are Dead (2008 )

Maybe it plays better to people who aren’t aging (26). I often notice that my students and I have a perception gap – they grew up in the Internet era (pervasive ads) whereas I was formed by the very end of the television era (ads and content separated) – seven years’ difference was enough for this. If Killola’s fans are even a bit younger, they might have developed the ability to ignore pervasive ads through sheer cultural evolution.

Or maybe the expectation is that people will treat the tracks as a preview, and buy the album, with the happy result of the band being paid twice – they’ll also be less likely to share it, because it’s already available for “free.” Either way, I think it’s ingenious, both as a distribution strategy and as a kind of satire. Unfortunately that insight comes at the expense of my ability to hear their music while it plays, which means my bias remains with the more traditional methods of self-distribution. I probably like Killola’s energetic guns-out garage pop, but it all has to stay provisional for the moment.

(Embarrassing that the only invisible way of acquiring music, the only one that doesn’t affect perception, involves an exchange of money or the explicit avoidance of an exchange of money.)

Music seems to be frozen at the start of any serious self-publishing movement; punks have been doing this for decades, and yet we’re still seeing the uncertainty about prestige (Allmusic doesn’t review self-released records by anyone not previously on a major) and the freeform experimentation which characterize the earliest stages of an idea. It’s always frustrating when the Internet fails to democratize things immediately, and it shouldn’t be as surprising as it is.