What, Yo La Tengo Worry?
September 15, 2006 at 9:21 pm 3 comments
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.”
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davidchiu | September 20, 2006 at 7:34 pm
Hi Ben. Great post and interesting article about this new form of marketing. That is so ironic that a band has to go back into the studio just to create bonus tracks (Bob Dylan probably doesn’t have that problem).
2. Yo La Tengo « The Slothful Review | October 1, 2006 at 1:50 am
[...] Also: a link to a short Yo La Tengo post from Sept 15th. [...]
3. Biting off more than I can chew- or how one sloth became three. « Never Seen a Sloth | October 8, 2006 at 6:38 pm
[...] At the Slothful Review, I will cover indie rock, including discussions of just what it means to be indie in today’s digital world. I will comment on stories as they arise, but will also conduct original reporting, even if that just involves asking Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan how the band is dealing with new-media. Finally, I will include reviews of bands and CD’s as I see fit. [...]