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Arcade Fire Wins Grammy, prompting Americans to wonder who they are anyway

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TheFuriousWombat:
The difference is, Arcade Fire is only "on" a major label outside the US in the sense that a major label distributes their music. The band, however, completely owns their music and thus has total creative control and total say-so over how and when their music is recorded, produced, licensed, packaged and so on. To me, that makes them independent by definition no matter where you're buying their music.

KvP:

--- Quote from: Johnny C on 15 Feb 2011, 08:08 ---i mean you can view this as "the industry sunk to meet us" the way chris weingarten cynically did OR you can view this as a band that basically made their way in north america the hard way (i.e. touring a fuckload and working with labels that, maybe with the exception of mercury who was their UK distributor on their last record, treat them largely as human beings) earning the same level of visibility within mainstream culture that someone like lady gaga, katy perry, or justin bieber has, without receiving virtually any airplay on pop radio. they did it by touring and by selling the absolute hell out of their records. so the actual "album of the year" part, not so relevant in terms of whether or not that album was actually the best of the year, but as a watermark of collective consciousness, a pretty staunchly independent band winning it is pretty fucking significant, dudes.

--- End quote ---
This thing (band tours lots, becomes famous without pop radio play) is a thing that has never happened before? Can you say with a straight face that if Billboard #1s were selling millions instead of low hundred thousands Arcade Fire would have made it anywhere near this award?

Also I think the main culprit here is the band's prostration before the altar of Springsteen. That's a hood pass through Baby Boomer town if there ever was one.

Tom:
In Australia they're distributed/advertised by one of our largest indie labels, Spunk. Only a handful of uni students and adults know who they are.

TheFuriousWombat:
So does their distribution in one country disqualify them universally from being considered independent? Here in the US they're NEVER on the radio apart from college stations and their music is very rarely heard in commercials, movie trailers, tv shows, and the like. You say "every album" like they're some hugely prolific band. Every album since Neon Bible is one other album. I dunno, they may be pretty popular but comparing Arcade Fire to U2 is totally absurd and not even remotely close to reality. I'm not defending them per se, I think they've released one great album and the rest have been fairly mediocre but their independent status is obvious to me which makes their Grammy win pretty significant. I don't know for sure but I would guess this is the first time a band not on a major label in America won this American award and considering the established Names they beat it's a pretty big shock to the system

Johnny C:

--- Quote from: KvP on 15 Feb 2011, 10:52 ---This thing (band tours lots, becomes famous without pop radio play) is a thing that has never happened before? Can you say with a straight face that if Billboard #1s were selling millions instead of low hundred thousands Arcade Fire would have made it anywhere near this award?

--- End quote ---

1) no the thing that has happened before is happening again in the 21st century when ringtones are a legitimate honest-to-god sales and success metric, i'm not dim enough to suggest that a band who tours a lot and subsequently becomes famous has never happened before, give me some credit
2) who knows dude, this is the reality we're given & i am trying to speak mainly to it

---words below---

tommy, dude, i dislike the idea of bands having to have managers as much as anyone else but to say that doesn't make them independent is a crock of shit. i talk to independent bands through press people every other week – bands that also hire people to book shows for them. that doesn't mean they're not independent, and that doesn't mean they lack an independent ethos. it means they have other stuff to do with their lives than be on the phone. it's really tough to hold that against them.

it's maybe not stridently ian mackaye ideologue independence but booking a tour and doing press and all that stuff is seriously ass-busting work, especially in north america where you have a ton of bands and a ton of ground to cover, and i know cause i'm friends with nationally touring bands and i've tried to do press for myself and it's a giant clusterfuck nightmare. when you're on the road for several months out of the year to be on the phone and in email contact with people across the country all hours of the day as well it may be doable but like so is grinding your own flour and sun-drying your own tomatoes yet i'm not some kind of hybrid heston-contessa dude so i'm not going to suggest that anyone who doesn't do that isn't a good cook. they want to buy some at the farmer's market or italian grocery or whatever? cool. similarly, if a band works with a press person or a booking agent – that's fine. plenty of bands have done that. i'm not sure where that stops – should bands not design their own websites? should they design and print all their posters? should they screen all their own shirts? press & package their music (note: these estates do this)? what separates those from having a booking agent, especially in 2011 when a website can honest-to-god be as important if not more important than having someone manage press?

the stuff with mercury? that's one record so far, and the record prior to it has sold 400,000 copies to date, all on merge, and during that record's promotion they toured with U2 and bruce springsteen in arenas across north america. and people went to see them, too. funeral's sold over half a million copies and was nominated for a best alternative grammy, which was prior to touring with U2 and to signing with mercury. (those sales, by the way, don't count tour sales, which aren't calculated or tracked by billboard.) and their ads were all over magazines and shit in canada and the states, don't kid yourself – they weren't on pop radio but still. they sold out madison square garden two nights in a row.

unless you're going to posit some really bizarre trickle-across profit thing that reveals how money from record sales in canada, the u.s., and other countries across the globe slowly funnel from merge to mercury,* this strikes me if anything as a validation of what weingarten says – "here is a band that is going to move the fuck out of some units," mercury says. "and 'sinking down to their level' and signing them will actually provide us with some revenue." here in north america, where they've sold the majority of their records, they're making bank, they moved tons of units, and they're doing it through merge. my mom likes the arcade fire too, and you know who told her? canadian public broadcast radio, who've been playing their records since the first ep.

like step 4 and 5 are severely disingenuous. step 3, like i said, isn't wrong. they did step 2 twice, the second time facilitating it by having built a reputation as a sterling live act and having had a first record that they put all their guts into take off. don't front as if this was impossible to accomplish without mercury unless you can like provide some actual proof about it. far as i can see, mercury saw a hot rod peeling out down the street and decided to skitch on it at the last second. if that rules them out as a band that's worked independently, fine. i guess if you're willing to ignore like six years of history then there's no real arguing with you.

i'm sorry! i'm on like three hours of sleep, so i'm kind of edgy. but the last thing i want to tell my friends in rah rah, who've been packing into a van a couple of times a year for the last three years to haul ass back and forth across the country playing first to crowds of 20 people and then nowadays crowds of several hundred, all while doing so on their own dime and on a locally-run record label, that they've betrayed the independent ethos by hiring a booking agent to book tours while they're working jobs and getting degrees, or that once they sign to a uk label for distro that negates everything they've worked at independently of said label. that sets me right off. and now i've written a bunch of words defending the arcade fire. for your next trick, back me into defending the beatles, maybe? paul's lawyers?

*the sole argument for this that i can determine is that them being popular over here will make them popular in the uk but they sold a ton of records in the uk before signing to merge anyways so i think crediting this exclusively to mercury's advertising campaign or suggesting that mercury single-handedly turned them into a band that has topped critics' best-of lists and debuted on the billboard charts for half a decade without their help is like some serious history-distorting stuff

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