was reading this interview of Tennis, the husband and wife duo, at Spinner.com and I got surprised by what they had to say about the internet. I think it is fair to say that, right now, people see the internet as a very efficient way to promote and sell music. But these two had a quite different experience with the world wide web:
‘I think the biggest problem we had was that we weren’t allowed the opportunity to define ourselves — the Internet defined us, for us, in basically every respect. From how people viewed us to what bands we got associated with to what type of listeners we’d have; none of that was even close to our choice. It was hard to get used to but we’re definitely flattered that people are even listening to our music.’
So it seems that, we, bloggers, are not always helping musicians! That’s true that, when we compare a band to another one, we categorize them with little escape. I suppose it is more prominent now with the massive amount of blogs.
But the most stunning thing was related to the artwork of their album, that they didn’t even choose:
‘Yeah. We were debating on two different pieces of artwork for our album and someone just took the picture of Alaina and posted it, saying it was the album cover. Then Pitchfork and maybe 80 other blogs took the photo and said it was our cover, so we didn’t have a choice. Stuff like that is our band in a nutshell. Like, we have demo versions of all our songs online. I don’t even know how people got them!’
So Pitchfork chose the artwork for them? Another reason to hate Pitchfork!