One of the core issues in fandom is the ongoing power struggle between fans and those who produce the materials around which they organize. Analysts tend to focus on how the internet has empowered fans, but as this piece by Tom Dorsey on fan efforts to save cancelled tv shows points out:

In the old days of snail mail it was harder to whip up a save-our-show campaign because there was no central meeting place for outraged fans to assemble.

Now the Internet serves as the perfect gathering spot to try to raise a ruckus. There are several sites that allow people to select their killed-off show from a laundry list and sign the online petition.

Some offer people a place to pen their frustration. Petitionspot.com is one. You can Google TV show petitions for others or search by show name.

But there is little reason to believe that network executives ever visit any of these sites. They’ve made up their minds by the time the ax falls, and there won’t be a change of heart for several reasons.

Around this time last year, I fell in love with a Norwegian rock band called Madrugada. Catch was, none of their records has been released in the US, they never tour here, and the only people I know who listen to them learned about them from me. What’s a newly-minted fan trying to piece together a prolific career she’s only just learned about to do?

Fortunately, I found madrugada.de. a fan site created and run by Reidar Eik, a Norwegian who lives in Berlin. The site is an amazing repository of detailed information and has a small but engaged group of dedicated and generous fans engaged in ongoing discussion on its forums.

It’s also an example of a fan page that has gained semi-official status. Madrugada have a link to the forum from their official page (though marked as an external site) and they keep Reidar informed. This seems particularly important in their online presence since, by their own admission, their own website is rarely updated (as I write, its new update is an apology for its infrequent updates). I spoke with Reidar about creating and running the site and how he sees the function of a fan page compared to that of an official site.

When did you start Madrugada.de?

November 12th 1999. I had seen them live for the first time on November 3rd the same year, and at the time there was only one poorly updated fan page available online, in addition to an official page lacking in content, and I felt that this was a band that could conquer the world and therefore deserved more. So when no one else did anything I figured I had to do it myself. It started out as a very small project where the focus was simply to present news about the band’s few upcoming European dates and how their release outside of Norway was panning out, and to present some rare tracks and live recordings in MP3 format for those who had only heard their popular (only in Norway, though) debut album.

At what point did the band/management find out about it? What were their reactions?

I am not sure when they first found out about the page. […] I did not have any contact with them or their management for the first year or so. For their European tour in the end of 2000 I figured I wanted to travel around and see as many of their shows as possible […] but also realized that this would be pretty expensive for a student. So I sent their management an e-mail asking kindly if it would be possible to get free tickets for a few of these concerts, to which former drummer Jon and Frode [bass player] replied in an e-mail and told me they loved my page and were very proud of what I was doing for them, and that I just had to show up anywhere and there would be a free ticket for me. That e-mail was the first contact I had with any of them, and of course that was a very nice start.

How do you see the role(s) of your site differing from the band’s official site?

I have always tried to be very in-depth when it comes to the information that is available on the fan page. Most of the reason for that is that I have always made the page with myself as the target audience. I want to make a page that I would want to visit, with information that I would want to read. Who the lead singer is currently dating never appealed to me in my adoration of the band, but whether an unreleased b-side was played live at a recent is big news to me. So the fanpage has always been very ‘heavy’ in areas like unreleased songs and concert setlists, but probably lacking in other areas. I realize it is not a ‘complete’ page, but my idea is that anyone can make a webpage and focus it on the parts of their subject that they really care about.

The official page has some of the necessary information a new fan would need to get into the band. It has some audio and video clips, some nice pictures, a very basic discography, and the recent tour dates. It is not a great page by any means, but for me it works as an introduction to the band. They also have a link directly to the discussion forum of my fan page, which is a very nice touch because it enables the fans of the band to get in direct contact with each other just one click away from the band’s official page. So while lacking in content, the official page makes up for it by using the resources the fans pool together.

There was also a time where there were a lot of of news updates on the official page coming directly from the management, and that was really nice. Of course it took the focus away from my page as being ‘the’ place to get the news, but I never really cared about that. I want the news to be available to the fans, that is all.

Do you think Madrugada benefit from the site? How?

I never really thought about this for the first few years. It is just a hobby project of mine, and again, just something I make because I would want to visit a page like that about a band that I like. But last year they thanked me in the liner notes of “The Deep End,” which I was pretty surprised by. The next time I met them I thanked them and told them that I had not expected that and did not think I deserved it, to which they replied “of course you do, for all the work you do for us.” So I suppose they see themselves getting something back from the efforts I put into it, and that is really nice. Maybe what they see is that when someone else does the work, they do not have to bother with it for the official page, hehe.

What are the biggest challenges in running the site?

That it is a band I started liking in early 1999, and I have now updated a page about them on a weekly (or at least monthly) basis for six and a half years straight. It is difficult to keep your interest for any band ‘at a peak’ the whole time, to keep up-to-date with news articles and forum entries and everything, and to sit down and write about them.

I do all the work on the page myself, so if I am slacking off, the page suffers. I still want to make sure that my heart is really in it, so I have tried to maintain that the page is about what I like, because I would rather present a small page that is complete and updated when it comes to the issues regarding the band that I care enough about to still be updating six and a half years later, rather than to present outdated and half-finished sections that I have not bothered updating.

The band is very supportive of what I do, and I get a lot of feedback from fans of the band and the many people who use the discussion forum. So it is a great encouragement to hear directly from the band that I do a good job and that they are proud of what I present, and to see fans gather and get along because I set up and maintain a forum for them to use. It is difficult to grow tired of doing this when there is so much good feedback, and the band is still interesting after all these years.

Having done this for a while as you have, what advice would you offer other people starting up or running fan sites?

Focus on the small bands that really deserve your interest and the time you put into the project. If you go for a band like Radiohead, thousands have already made better pages than yours will ever be, but if you go for the local band who sound like they should be selling millions of copies, you will be the first. They might turn out to be ‘the next big thing’ and it will be great, or they might dissolve into nothing. But hopefully they have tried, and you went along for the ride.

To follow up on my posting the other day, here’s more on the Arctic Monkeys’ use of the internet to rise to fame. And, oh yeah, massive protestations against the notion that MySpace had anything to do with it:

It is on the internet, too, that the implications of the Arctic Monkeys’ success seem most profound. It appears to invert the music industry’s long-held fears of free-music-based, web-led meltdown. Instead, internet file-sharing and discussion built a grass-roots movement of fans for the Arctic Monkeys’ music. This practice has been institutionalised, and perverted, by MySpace.com, the massive website where individuals and bands such as the Arctic Monkeys accumulate “friends”, who support and debate their activities. Rupert Murdoch’s buy-out of the company shows the way this briefly democratic set-up is likely to go.

The implications of industry-bypassing channels seem enormous. Most commentators see the Arctic Monkeys’ hit as its first above-ground eruption, the main reason their success this year is so crucial. The band themselves, however, beg to differ. In fact, they find the idea appalling.

“Somebody said to us, ‘I saw your profile on MySpace,’ ” sniffed drummer Matt Helders to US website prefixmag.com. “I said, ‘I don’t even know what MySpace is.’ [When we went to No. 1 in England] we were on the news and radio about how Myspace has helped us.

But that’s just the perfect example of some-one who doesn’t know what the f— they’re talking about.”

Just for the record, I find MySpace too ugly to look at and don’t spend time there if I can avoid it, but it’s more than a little interesting to see the conflation between the internet and MySpace, and also to see a band that has benefited from the net so much nonetheless seek to distance themselves from it.

You’re on MySpace. You’ve got fans. They contact you through your site. That’s the point, right? Unless you’re a high school basketball star, that is. Then it’s a NCAA recruiting violation:

“Fans are not allowed to interact with recruitable student athletes,” Kentucky athletics spokesman Scott Stricklin said Wednesday. “We had to report that to the NCAA.”

When I was 13 and in love with a lot of pop bands, I would occassionally read interviews with them where they said things like “at least we don’t appeal to 13 year old girls” or “we want to appeal to more than 13 year old girls.” I got the message — REAL bands didn’t have fans like me. When I met the internet, one of the first thoughts I had was that if it had been there when I was a 13 year old girl, I’d have been so empowered as a music fan by being able to hide my age. I’d have passed for an older teen at least, and would have been respected in ways I couldn’t be in person.

But now I see that the new ’13 year old girls’ are internet users. What’s worse than having 13 year old girl fans? Having… INTERNET fans. Yep, if that’s where your hype begins, then you’re really suspect. Witness this article in which Canadian band Hawthorne Heights responds to the charge that they are “a MySpace band.”

Bucciarelli’s agitation seems warranted, as most people who bash Hawthorne Heights claim that they’re a “MySpace band” who only got popular via the internet:

“It might account for a fraction of our success,” Bucciarelli reasons. “It seems that every interview we do we get people asking us about MySpace and it being the reason behind our success, and to do that is to completely ignore that we toured for three straight years.

Note that getting popular through MySpace is constructed as a charge that merits “agitation” rather than, oh, pride? How about “yeah, we’ve been really good at combining MySpace with touring. It’s worked great for us.”

Now I have nothing against Hawthorne Heights, I haven’t heard them but kinda like their Bronte-esque 19th Century name (or is it the name of a gated community somewhere in a Neal Stephenson novel?). I choose it as an example of a phenomenon where people assume there are two kinds of fans (1) the REAL ones that you earn through [fill in form of traditional fan-garnering here] and (2) the internet ones. As though they were two distinct sets of individuals.

Last spring I noticed a lot of backlash against The Arctic Monkeys, word was their rise was based entirely on “internet hype” — what could be more suspect? This article from Boston.com outlines how the internet drove their success:

No packaging. No pitching. No payola. The notion of a band finding a fan without the machinations of middlemen inspires utopian visions of art uncorrupted, a power-to-the-people model of music making and consuming. But while Web-generated hype may be more credible than the carefully crafted fluff coming out of boardrooms, it isn’t without its pitfalls.

The pitfalls? Online fans can… CLICK ELSEWHERE JUST AS EASILY! Which, as the article points out, makes them pretty much like the record labels. And as I might add, suspiciously similar to those mythic “offline fans.”

And who are the offline fans these days? How many fans who pay no attention to a band’s online presence are left? I would like to see some real figures on what percentage of people who see live music and buy cds are true “offline fans” getting turned on to music only through the timeworn networks of radio, tv, record stores and friends. Cuz I’m guessing that just about every band who makes it these days is picking up a seriously healthy chunk of their listeners through the internet. Maybe dissing them isn’t such a good approach.