Interview: DearRockers’s Darren Barefoot
Thanks to the wonder of file-sharing and BitTorrent, any tech savvy music fan can fill even the largest iPod with their favorite artists’ complete back catalogues for no more than the cost of internet service. But oh, the guilt that follows in the morning. Remorseful Radiohead fan Darren Barefoot, a web marketer by day, recently launched DearRockers.org, a site where fans can post apology letters to artists whose music they love even though they never got around to actually paying them for it.
Where did you get the idea for the site? Were you inspired at all by the recent self-release, pay what you want experiments by Radiohead and Saul Williams?
I’m aware of the Radiohead experiment, and Madonna’s apparent reworked deal, and of the changing face of the record industry. I’m also aware of how little money artists get from CD and iTunes sales, and of how many middlemen there are who take a slice. I guess the site was spawned by those two ideas.
Your “Rarely Asked Question” page says that you were inspired in part by PostSecret. Are you a big fan of that site?
It’s an exceptional concept, and I really admire its simplicity. I’ve come to think of these projects as pop art experiments. The really great ones like PostSecret work because of the greatness of the idea, not the execution.
Have you heard back from any of the artists mentioned on the site? If the site gets more well-known, do you expect to?
I haven’t, but it’s only been up for a couple of weeks. I don’t really have a clear understanding of how much musicians ‘ego-surf’ on the web, so I don’t really expect to hear from anybody. That said, I would be curious to hear what they think of the idea. And whether they actually got their money. As a result of this project, I’ve begun to wonder how popular you get before you stop opening your own fan mail.
What do you suppose most artists will think when they get the money in the mail, happy to get paid or mad that people don’t want to buy their music at the store?
Any thinking artist should understand the realities of music distribution, so I doubt they’d be angry. Besides, five bucks is equal to the revenue they receive from about thirty songs on iTunes, so they shouldn’t complain.
I’ve also discovered literally dozens of artists because I downloaded one of their songs. Rilo Kiley, Feist, Dave Matthews, The New Pornographers–the list goes on and on. I’ve subsequently bought these musician’s CDs or their songs on eMusic and gone to their live shows.
It seems like this site gets to the heart of an interesting and very prevalent idea about the music industry. A lot of people want to support their favorite artists, but don’t care about supporting the record industry as a whole. Why do you think this is?
The record industry has done nothing to ingratiate itself to its customers in the past two decades. To pick a few ills: changing formats, DRM, suing college students and grandmothers, exploiting artists, and so forth. They’re an easy group to hate.
Do you remember what the first album you downloaded or got from a friend was?
In my early teens, I spent a lot of time renting CDs from a local video store and taping them. That was pretty fundamental to forming my musical taste, actually. In terms of downloading, I remember one of the first songs I downloaded was Len’s “Steal My Sunshine,” a summer hit from 1999.
Is there an artist that you have a large amount of their music that you didn’t pay for that you felt particularly guilty about?
Well, I wrote the first letter on the site to Radiohead, because I’ve downloaded a couple of their albums, and never bought any nor seen them in concert.
Your website is obviously not doing anything illegal, but it’s easy to picture someone like Universal CEO Doug Morris getting outraged at its existence. Have you gotten any negative responses about the site, or do you expect to?
A couple of people have pointed out that writing a letter is kind of an invitation to the RIAA (or CRIA up here in Canada) to sue the letter writer. The same goes for me as the site creator, I guess. I haven’t received any negative responses yet, but its early days.
After scrawling through the site’s fanmail.biz link for a while, it looked like there were a few artists that didn’t have addresses. Is there anyone in particular that you would advise to get that taken care of?
The best alternative strategy is just to Google for ‘(band name) fan mail address.’ That seems to work fairly well.
What’s your favorite letter that you’ve received so far?
Just yesterday I got a great letter to Axl Rose. It was beautifully photographed, and kind of made fun of him for the eternal promise of ‘Chinese Democracy’. Very cheeky.
>>>Michael Tedder
