Too much Internet hype can wreck bands, jobs

Just last week, respected indie-rock magazine Harp put out its last issue – the mag is closing… Just last week, respected indie-rock magazine Harp put out its last issue – the mag is closing its doors because of poor sales.

Around the same time, SPIN magazine, arguably the second most popular music magazine after Rolling Stone, featured on its cover a little band called Vampire Weekend, whose raison d’etre thus far in its short career has been blogging, the Internet and a little thing called hype.

Now how in the world are these two events connected? As Bob Dylan might say, “The modern times.”

Before we go any further, let’s clarify: Vampire Weekend, the quartet of Columbia University grads who just recently released an album of jumpy, afro-pop gems, is not to blame for the demise of Harp magazine.

But the band is, however, part of a phenomenon that is, more than ever, contributing to the decline of music print journalism. In other words, I shudder to think about the job market I’ll enter after graduation and wincingly look toward the possibility of a career in, say, sandwich making or obituary writing.

You see, Vampire Weekend rode into iTunes stores and Sam Goody’s a few weeks ago on a tsunami of hype – that word meaning, “Everyone is talking about them hyperbolically, and no one’s heard their record.” Seems silly, right? Well, it is, but it’s an inescapable truth in today’s entertainment business.

Vampire Weekend’s ascent to the indie-rock throne basically went down as thus: About two years ago VW formed while the band members finished their degrees at Columbia, playing house parties and school functions (that’s right – with this logic, any band you see in a South Oakland basement could be the next big thing).

Then, last summer, with only a few tracks released and heard mainly on the Internet, they embarked on an actual tour, playing at several taste-making indie festivals and rocking shows around the country. How in the world could a band go from house parties to packing main-stage venues without having released a record, without any mainstream radio play and without a record label?

The answer is hype. Vampire Weekend, from the first note of music streamed on the Internet, has been every music blogger’s wet dream. Something new! Something exciting! Something that sounds like Paul Simon for hipsters!

The band was written about and written about, with all praise based on just a few tracks – hyped up so much that by the time the record came out last month, it actually debuted at Billboard’s No. 17, selling almost 30,000 copies in its first week and landing the band a SPIN Magazine cover, revealing the ultimate truth of the day: The Internet is not just for porn, it’s also for power.

Now, of course, time will only tell if Vampire Weekend can withstand the power of hype.

After all, many a band has been championed by the Internet-hype machine (whose major players include www.pitchforkmedia.com, www.brooklynvegan.com and even Rolling Stone magazine’s blogs) and failed to survive its churning, unforgiving power, finally releasing its record and making folks say, “Well, I guess they weren’t that good after all.”

Or, what’s maybe worse, releasing a solid first album, then falling off the face of the earth (see: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand).

This is not to say that said bands are not good at what they do – they are – but rather that the monumental hype surrounding them before they release actual music is simply too much to live up to.

To put this in another perspective, let’s pretend that we are smart. In high school, our parents told all their country club, water cooler or hunting buddies that “My [child’s name] is going to get a perfect SAT score! He’s just that smart! I saw him solve trigonometry problems before he could use a toilet!”

Shortly thereafter, said buddies tell their buddies, and before long, even the mailman and the elderly crossing-guard woman believe that we will, in fact, score perfectly on the SATs. But then we don’t.

The resulting reactions are split two ways. Some people turn on us for letting them down (“I thought we’d finally have a smart kid in this damn town”) or just ignore us, quickly moving on to the next kid whose parents tout him as a baby Einstein.

Luckily for Vampire Weekend, the album is actually very, very good. Singer Ezra Koenig sings about Cape Cod and grammar rules to twisty guitar lines and pogo-stick percussion – it’s more fun than an actual pogo stick, and much easier to maneuver.

Still, this band had Cathedral of Learning-sized hype, and so it remains to be seen whether the Columbia crew will outlast it to become more than just another It band.

So what does this have to do with Harp Magazine shutting down shop? Well, with Internet hype breaking bands months or, as is the case with Vampire Weekend, almost a year before an actual album drops, music magazines have lost much of their edge.

We no longer need to open a new SPIN Magazine to find out the latest new bands – we can simply Google “new bands indie” and come up with 19,600,000 results. Seriously.

Factor in MySpace and PureVolume, websites that allow bands to build their own hype by posting pre-album tracks themselves, and the place for print music journalism dwindles even further.

Music magazines have long been forums for new bands to break and for fans to get inside the minds of the musicians they love, and now that first job has been outsourced.

Glen Sabin, the CEO of the company that owns Harp, said in a recent statement on the magazine’s website, “The music industry [is] undergoing a revolutionary period. Labels are inevitably spending less money for print and other forms of advertising and promotion.” There you have it. Internet killed the magazine star.

At least I can make a mean sandwich.

E-mail Justin at jhj11@pitt.edu.