http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/myspace_pr.html
The Hit Factory
Who needs major labels, marketing, or airplay? A social networking site is getting more hits than Google -- and turning invisible bands into mini entertainment networks. How MySpace became the MTV for the Net generation.
By Jeff Howe
The members of Hawthorne Heights have no business being rock stars. They play a strain of punk that has consigned innumerable bands to the obscurity of dive bars and pirate radio. For the past three decades, a devotion to this stripped-down, anticommercial music has meant never quitting your day job.
And yet here they are on a dusty summer day in Pomona, California, playing for thousands of adoring fans. Hawthorne Heights is a big draw at this year's Warped Tour, a movable punk feast featuring more than 300 bands on 48 North American stops. The kids in the audience - a multiracial mix of teens from across Southern California - appear transported, pushing toward the front of the stage where slam dancers crash against each other like pinballs. Those in the front rows chant the lyrics with red-faced intensity. They've memorized the entire set.
Hawthorne Heights is touring the country in a plush bus. The quintet's debut album, The Silence in Black and White, has sold more than 500,000 copies since its release last year, and the group has appeared on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live and been on MTV's TRL. The five young men from Dayton, Ohio, are living the rock-and-roll dream - but they took a highly unconventional path to get there. The band achieved its popularity without any real radio or TV airplay, a feat unheard-of a few years ago. They aren't signed to a major label, and they don't want to be. They don't need industrial-strength marketing campaigns or heavy rotation.
What they have is MySpace, a community Web site that converts electronic word of mouth into the hottest marketing strategy since the advent of MTV. Massively popular, MySpace is nominally a social networking site like Friendster, but nearly 400,000 of the site's roughly 30 million user pages belong to bands. The rest belong mostly to teens and twentysomethings who attend the groups' shows, download their songs, read their blogs, send them fan mail, and enthusiastically spread the word.
