Will Crouse doesn’t look like a drummer. A neat, slender blonde with a calm demeanor and rational face, Crouse, a Communication junior, is a far cry from the stereotypical sweaty, uncouth wild man flailing behind a drum kit at rock shows. Then again, no one in Crouse’s band, The Earth is a Man, really fits that media-nurtured rock star stereotype. As he parks outside a scruffy two-story house on Garnett Place, which the band has dubbed Xanadu in reference to “Citizen Kane”, Crouse gives it an appreciative look.
“Welcome to Xanadu,” he says. “This is where it all happens.”
Along the building’s battered side and down its basement entrance, Crouse greets Earth guitarist Doug Kaplan, also a Communication junior. Crawling on all fours with his sleeves rolled up to hook up his pedals, Kaplan doesn’t seem to mind the half century’s worth of dust covering the barren concrete floor or the scant insulation that does little to keep out the cold. He’s an imposing figure, stocky with thick, curly black hair. His glasses, perched on his prominent nose, give him a cultivated look that masks his youth.
“This is how it always starts,” Kaplan says as he negotiates with a knot of wires the size of his fist. Each cord ends in five different colored cubes. “People just sort of trickle in. We’ll be starting soon once Zach and Max come down.”
Speak of the devil-in comes Bienen sophomore Zach Robinson, kicking open the rickety door, his boyish face half obscured by the box of equipment he carries. Behind him is Weinberg junior Max Allison, tall, long-faced and brown-bearded. They waste no time setting up. Robinson doesn’t bother removing his heavy wool coat before strapping on his black Fender Stratocaster guitar. He screeches out a few face melter effects. Kaplan strums out a few random chords on his burnished Gibson. Crouse finishes setting up his drum set and Allison his bass. They go off like dynamite. Their energy burns life into the basement squalor, an energy as visible as the steam rising from the naked pipes beside them.
For decades, countless college bands have dreamt of hitting it big. Earth too aspires to spread their sound to the masses. But their approach is emblematic of how drastically the world of commercial music has changed. Getting signed to a label, once seen as crucial to a band’s commercial viability, isn’t such a priority anymore. The proliferation of file-sharing and blogging has compelled many artists to give away their music for free online in an attempt to start a domino effect of electronic downloads via word-of-mouth.
“There are so many bands now that literally put their shit up on the Internet and become famous,” Robinson says. “Passion Pit started like two years ago as a present to the lead guy’s girlfriend. They put their stuff on the Internet and they got signed. It’s so easy, but it’s hard because it’s so easy. Anyone with a MySpace can put out a recording. Just look up your favorite band on Wikipedia and see how long they’ve been around.”
Top-40 radio, long dominated by major labels, no longer serves as people’s main gateway to finding new music. Indie blogs and social networking sites where artists can share their music with the world can be all a band needs to score a hit. “For every band trying to break into the industry, it’s crucial to go viral, to promote themselves online and engage people with MySpace, Facebook and Last.fm,” Allison says. “Sending out demo tapes to ‘X’ and ‘Y’ seems pretty obsolete at this point.”
Sam Adams, for example, a college rapper from Cambridge, Mass., in March surprisingly debuted at No. 1 on the iTunes hip-hop chart, besting major label titans like Lil’ Wayne. However, claims surfaced that he gamed the system by downloading the vast majority of his first week sales himself, prompting some to call him “Scam Adams.” Regardless of whether the claims are true, his song “I Hate College,” a remix of Asher Roth’s hit “I Love College,” has garnered more than 1 million hits on YouTube. His Facebook has more than 26,000 fans; his Twitter, more than 2,100 followers.
Robinson’s experience self-promoting his solo project, D/A/D, an electro-rock homage to ’80s pop music, has served as a blueprint for Earth. “Take Super Mash Bros., for instance,” he says, referring to an L.A.-based duo he grew up with. “They made an album. They put it on the Internet for free and got more than 2,000 downloads the first month. That was July 2008. Now they have more than 100,000 downloads combined, just from their first album. They have an agent now because they’re doing so many shows, but they’re not signed. And they’re making mad money. That’s how it’s going to be now. Just make your first album available for free. Hopefully, you’ll get a little more momentum and maybe you can sell it. Recording will give us a lot more credibility, but I don’t really care about getting signed. Labels just have to embrace what’s going on.”
Independent labels haven’t been hit as hard by the fall of the old model. Drag City, Chicago’s premier independent rock label, operates with only a minuscule staff and budget compared to major recording companies but still distributes the music of more than 100 artists and receives dozens of solicitations from unsigned musicians from around the world. Most of the day-to-day work is coordinated by sales manager Rian Murphy, a slightly pudgy, brown-haired old-timer who’s worked full-time at the label since its inception in 1989.
“In the old days, the independents were looked upon as the minor leagues for the major’s major league. I don’t think that’s the case anymore,” Murphy says. “Fifteen years ago there were a lot of complaints that the independents would be crushed by corporate entities because they couldn’t possibly muster the same resources. Now we see corporate entities suffering in the sense that the bigger they are the harder they fall. A label like Drag City can exist on equal footing with major labels and actually adapt to changing times.”
But even though independents like Drag City have benefited from the current atmosphere, they aren’t immune to piracy. With more and more unsigned bands blowing up on the Internet, Murphy worries if labels can continue to adapt. The recent near-dissolution of Touch and Go Records, a model for many independent labels, has made Murphy aware of the possibility labels may one day become completely obsolete.
“As the CD becomes devalued and digital downloads have reached a plateau that they cannot climb, it concerns us,” Murphy says. “When a company like Touch and Go can’t exist on the model they built, everyone has to look closer at what they’re doing and ask ‘Are we all doomed?'”
Earth has been approached by some web distributors, but they want to record a proper album before selling anything. That will happen soon if all goes as planned; they were discussing securing a studio spot at the same house that Thrill Jockey, an independent label in Chicago, uses to record.
“As far as the success we’d like to have, an artist like Dan Deacon is a good template,” Allison says. “He rose from bizarre obscurity. He blew up on word-of-mouth, self-distributed records and his own computer recordings. He seems to be the guy who still hasn’t signed with a major label but who a lot of people respect.”
Earth began last fall. Crouse and Allison were already jamming together regularly and were looking for like-minded musicians who shared their passion for creating original music. They met Kaplan at a party at Allison’s apartment, dubbed “El Cuatro,” and Robinson joined up after the other three answered his Facebook notice looking for students who wanted to start a mathcore band.
Earth’s organic approach echoes the surrealist Roberto Matta painting from which they take their namesake. Crouse describes Earth’s sound as a brand of instrumental, metal-inspired math rock and spills out a long list of bands they love, groups like drone rock duo Sunn O))), progressive metal band Mastodon, indie pop act Of Montreal, Dan Deacon and C
hicago math rock act Maps & Atlases. They all have three things in common: a challenging sound, a relatively small but dedicated fan base and a measure of fame only possible through the blogosphere, file-sharing and word-of-mouth.
Although blowing up has become even more randomized by the digital age, the bandmates have sacrificed much of their college life for a shot at that small chance. Crouse considers his life to consist entirely of theater and the band and has dropped most of his commitments from the previous year to devote more energy to the project. Since he started playing drums in middle school, he has defined himself with his rock musicianship. But he shifts uneasily in his chair when he contemplates balancing the life of a full-time student and career planning while playing sporadic gigs and writing new material with Earth.
“We’re in a very murky place where we don’t know how serious we are,” Crouse says. “I don’t think we know whether or not we want to be signed necessarily. Yes, we would love to be signed, that would be great, but we don’t know how much we’re actively pursuing that.”
Earth believes in going out to find their audience instead of waiting for them to come. One January evening Earth played a free show at Norris without any prior publicity to a few dozen unsuspecting students. Two clacks from Crouse’s drumsticks signaled a headfirst dive into “Everybody’s Fun,” a track driven by Robinson’s clean guitar licks and Crouse’s plowing drums with a crescendo carried skyward by a geyser of reverb. Its finish was greeted by a healthy applause.
“Thanks for coming out,” Robinson says. “Our band is called The Earth is a Man.”
