A lot of labels are hiring a lot more accountants than people that know music.
As a band, you're always growing. I think we've taken this to a different place, producing most of it on our own.
Because of the age group of our fans and the evolution of the Internet, I think we've been able to keep people involved more actively, and I think that's a huge positive for us, and definitely for the future of music.
College students have a real impact in shaping whether independent music takes hold of a bigger piece of the pie or whether it dies.
Complete artist control comes down to money. It's who's got the check and how many stockholders there are. And less stockholders means more control.
Creating the record company gives you a lot of great opportunities. It gives you an avenue to express yourself in different ways. Starting this record company was an opportunity to really get closer to our fans.
Everybody knows that this is a very risky business.
Getting radio airplay and reaching out to people through other avenues is important, but you just have to choose your battles.
I don't know if exactly what we're doing is the future for every artist. I don't know if it's the future of the music business.
I feel bad for any band who is put in a position to be doing something that doesn't really represent what they are, or who are being perceived as something alternative to what they really are.
I feel like I'm in more of a race against myself than against people's perceptions. You know what you're capable of doing and what you believe you're supposed to be doing.
I feel like you should never be satisfied that you've done it, that you've achieved the goal of making sure everybody knows what you are.
I love going to shows, and I don't want to hear the same song like 30 times. I want to go through an experience, I want to go up and down.
I think it's up the band, ultimately, to brand themselves, and I think you're at a disadvantage if you're within the major label system right now, because there's really no focus on any long-term thinking.
I think now we're in a place where we're especially charged about the idea of being independent because it really is a unique time, an important time to cut your own path and take hold of your career.
I think quality control went downhill. The job of future music executives is to be the quarterbacks and continue to say, I'm gonna be setting up these artists to succeed.
I think the deal with rumor mills is that they're exactly that; they're not always the reality.
I think there was never any question that we were going to find a way to succeed at a level that would allow us to keep going, and I think it's a huge credit to our fans.
I'm 22, I could be in school. In a perfect world, things like studying other aspects would be totally awesome, but there is no time.
If the music industry doesn't wake up and remember they're not indispensable, they're gonna all fall flat on their faces. You can't just go along and try and set up a pattern that's just going to work every time.
If we're a kid band or teen band or twenties band or thirties band, there'll always be the question of, what are you now?
If you don't have artists who are looking at one another and realizing they're part of a greater whole, you can't exhibit the sense of a movement or the sense of excitement with your fans. They feed off of that energy.
In our case, we're the CEOs, so that's the best situation you can be in.
It's always hard when you make a strong impression, because whatever that impression is, good or bad, it's clear. We've always played offense.
It's become really trendy to put out a greatest hits or best of too early. It's spawned by a major label idea. But for us, it's more about the live and electric part.
It's just a really intimate show. It's kind of a campfire style, into the songwriting session kind of a vibe.
Most bands never have the type of cultural, broad success that we've been able to have.
Nuclear holocaust might eliminate the Internet.
Our idea of the Internet is that it's an open source, a place where people all over the world can instantly get content. We've tried to use it as a way to develop trust with our fans as much as possible.
People don't realize who this band is always been because we're so young, and it's hard to get over that stigma.
Radio is a really strange business now, too. There's a very narrow door and a very few people control what gets played.
Sometimes, fear is good. Sometimes it's a good thing to have a little bit of a reality check.
The key is not major versus minor versus independent. The key is to be focused and to continue to reinvent and to continue to be humbled by the audience.
The real point is your business model allows you to only have to have a small amount of success. The structure of a lot of the major companies is, it's become imperative to have great success or it's a loss.
The real question is, how do you fit into people's lifestyles?
The standard should be Prince's live show, not Britney Spears's live show.
There was a huge gap of time between the last album and this one. We released an acoustic album before the full-length record.
There were some political issues with our old record company.
There's definitely some internal issues with people who don't know music.
There've been a lot of collaborations with a lot of great people on each of the records we've done.
They don't have to go buy the album. There's not one avenue where you can go to the one department store, like it was 50 years ago, to buy everything. Now, you've got a million strip malls, and the Internet. Now you can see it all, buy it all.
To the world you may be one person but to one person you may be the world.
Ultimately, I can't think of a situation I could possibly rather be in that what we're in right now.
We decided that we would rather take the documentary to universities than focus on film festivals. We're using college campuses as a new form of the film festival, because it's a more real application.
We did talk with several major record companies, and there was interest, but it's the same system, and we just didn't want to be there.
We have a fan club section within the website, where people are actually paid members, and they get extra bonus content and access to concert tickets early and those kind of things.
We have a pretty big family. New Year's, for almost every year, for the last 7, 8 years, we've been back in our hometown.
We knew was that we weren't going to be able to get another album out any sooner than early 2006, and we felt that the documentary and the universities and the live content was something that was important to come out together.
We really want to be able to help other artists. We really want to be able to bring other music forward to new audiences.
We want the fans to be engaged. And there's a certain amount of imaging that went on with that, because it put all this new music in a different light. There's no question that that was positive.
We wanted to focus on supporting independent music in a very real way, and that's exactly what's going to happen.
We were just in Beijing and Shanghai, and it's been awesome.
We were never anything but what we are now. We just happened to be really young when we started, but we've always been writers, players, singers.
We'd much rather work hard and crazy for something we thought was a great idea.
We're in an era where the MTV generation of people judges things based on visuals first, and what people are talking about with the Internet is it being a thing that's going to make things more and more fickle, but I think it's the opposite of that.
We're not just gonna sign somebody before we're fully ready to get behind that band and give them a good push in the same way that we would want as a band. We kind of have the advantage of using ourselves as guinea pigs; whatever mistakes we make, we can make them on ourselves first.
We're not just interested in just being Hanson. We want to write and produce for people. We want to score movies. We want to do things that are outside of just the confines of being in this band.
We're one band of many who've been in this situation of being caught in this kind of swirling corporate problem.
We're touring with the Pat McGee Band, and we're setting up contests where local bands in each market submit their music and get voted on through the college radio station and through our website to be the opening act on all these shows.
We've always had an amazing group of fans; we've always tried to do what we can to keep them energized.
When we first came out, we were so young that there's a certain perception, and that evolution has to happen.
When you make a record, it's got to be the right record. It's got to be ready to come out. And we wrote, God, 80 songs over the period of this album.
You can be 40 years old or you can be 10 years old and be a fan-and we've seen it all-but definitely our peers are the most devoted.
You can decide to start a porn site, or you can decide to start a great music community and fulfill something. Both of those things spread like wildfire.
You can hear the music first before you judge the color, creed, attitude, and dressing style of a particular artist. So artists have to step up.
You can say we're trying too hard or that we didn't try hard enough, but we're not trying at all; we're just doing what we do.
You have a natural meeting of the minds as you make each record.
You have to lead people to get excited and be passionate and be activated by what you do.
You kind of reach people all over the world, and that's something amazing.
You never get to pick how you get pinned and how people perceive you.
Second child Penelope was born on April 19th 2005.
They have a daughter named Penelope Anne Hanson who was born on the 19th of april.
You can share a link to this page with your friend!