Even If It Kills Them |Not everyone has as much money as Radiohead, you know.
MOTION CITY SOUNDTRACK
w/ The Spill Canvas. July 19 (5pm). The Starlite Room (10030-102 St). Tickets available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca).
When a band’s album leaks well in advance of its release date, the band might try to spin the situation into something positive—for instance, by claiming that the leak shows the fans really want to hear the music, or that filesharing doesn’t even bother the band to begin with.
But when their second album, Commit This to Memory, was leaked to the internet just one day after being mastered, Motion City Soundtrack was downright livid. The leak cost the pop-rock outfit thousands of units in sales and spurred their label, the indie giant Epitaph, to place anti-piracy software on the album’s official release, seriously limiting how fans could play and listen to the disc.
Then, last year, when the band recorded their newest effort, they took extra precautions to ensure they didn’t experience déjà vu. Copies of Even If It Kills Me were sent to journalists with watermarks and a handwritten warning—described by lead guitarist and backing vocalist Joshua Cain as a “threatening letter”—urging those who received advance copies not to release the album before its street date.
“We had the new album under lock and key in a vault, which is why it didn’t leak,” says Jesse Johnson, the band’s keyboardist and Moogist, only semi-facetiously. “But it’s something that you can’t prevent—most albums leak eventually, especially if you’re on an independent label. You have to send your album out months in advance in order to be reviewed in time, and the labels don’t have the luxury of hosting lavish listening parties.”
While Johnson admits the band even considered not sending out review copies at all, Motion City Soundtrack ended up trying alternative methods of preventing piracy, including inviting journalists to a Nike ID studio to listen to the album with the band itself.
“We really thought about [not sending out advance copies],” Johnson says, “but it’s kind of like shooting yourself in the foot. You still need people to hear the album and spread the word about it, which is what the magazines do. Bands might not like the album being out there so far before it goes on sale, but it’s part of the business.”
And the measures to curb leaks of Even If It Kills Me proved effective. The album reached #1 on the Top Independent Albums charts, and sold more than 33,000 copies in its first week on its way to becoming the most critically acclaimed of the band’s three discs.
Motion City Soundtrack have followed up that success with an EP featuring acoustic versions of songs from Even If It Kills Me. The EP is currently an iTunes exclusive, with a physical release scheduled for later this year.
“It seemed like something fun to do,” Johnson says. “When we’re just hanging out and strumming on a guitar, we often try and adapt our songs to that format. One day we were sitting around and figured, ‘Why not put out an actual release of these songs?’ And then the label thought it was a good idea, so here we are. Really all we did we hang out in the studio for a week revisiting songs we already know and really love and got to play them again. That’s what I call a good job.”
