What, Yo La Tengo Worry?

I interviewed Ira Kaplan, Yo La Tengo‘s guitarist, for a story in the Forward and asked him about his opinion of digital media.

“There are always changes in business and you have to accommodate them,” he said. “I don’t spend much time worrying about it.”

Maybe that explains the band’s late arrival to MySpace.

But with Yo La Tengo’s new album, “I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass,” now in stores, he did acknowledge that his label, Matador, is “very concerned about it.”

In fact they’re so concerned about declining CD sales, they’ve invented incentives to get fans to pre-order the album on-line. These include unreleased tracks on MP3 (which Yo La Tengo reportedly had to go back to the studio to produce) and first dibs on concert tickets. They’ve dubbed it “the Season Pass.”