Power To The People
It took no time at all for music lovers worldwide to take a shining to indietronica trio Foster The People, but it may never have happened if the LA rockers hadn’t posted the anthemic ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ online as a free download. Mark Foster tells Celina Murphy all about making it big, avoiding the one-hit-wonder pothole, and remembering the little guy.
Celina Murphy, 04 Jan 2012
Many people will tell you that a particular song changed their life, but Mark Foster, Mark Pontius and Cubbie Fink can prove it. Just a couple of months after the synth-happy band formed in Los Angeles, Foster posted one of their first compositions online as a free download. Within a few weeks, the song had been featured on every blog from here to Liechtenstein and his inbox was clogged with emails offering record deals, distribution deals and pretty much anything he wanted.
As is to be expected in the frankly bonkers world of rock ‘n’ roll, what happened next was even more bizarre. Having secured a multi-album deal with Columbia Records, ‘Pumped Up Kicks’, spent eight consecutive weeks at number three on the Billboard ‘Hot 100’, making it the first alternative number one to crack the US top five since Kings Of Leon’s ‘Use Somebody’ in 2009. The track has now sold at least three million copies, has been viewed 45 million times on YouTube and… well, the numbers just keep getting bigger and bigger from there.
Without really thinking about it, singer-songwriter Mark Foster had become the international poster boy for free downloading as a method of promoting music.
“That really put us on the map,” he tells me, as the band prepare for their second ever Irish show in Dublin’s Olympia (it’s a sell-out). “We were like, ‘Yeah, please pirate our stuff! Please! Make ten CDs and hand them out to all your friends. Email it to 100 people if you want!’ It gave the song life and gave it the freedom to do what it was going to do.
‘I think the hardest thing when you’re a new band is really just making people aware of you. There’s so much competition, there’s so much music out there, that’s the toughest thing, but if you’re on people’s radar, that’s much more valuable than trying to make a couple of bucks off an EP. If you’re an unknown band trying to sell your music right away, just give it away! Give it away for free until you can parlay that into some real success. That was definitely one of the most important decisions we made.”
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