The Garage Band Success Story

by Brad King

3:00 a.m. Aug. 1, 2000 PDT

There's an old axiom in the independent music scene that says fire your  manager because he doesn't do anything for you. Monovox didn't go that far, but  the quartet did hit one of the biggest digital music jackpots by ignoring him.

Over their manager's objections, the group uploaded one of their songs to garageband.com in hopes of winning a  four-album, $250,000 recording contract offered by the site.

Hear the Monovox Interview

 "Our manager didn't want us to blow up with one song and die out like a  one-hit wonder," said Anthony Shaw, Monovox's lead singer. "He wanted us to be a  long-term band and he saw that song as something that could be threatening to a  long-term career."

At San Francisco's garageband.com, independent bands can upload a song onto  the website. Fans who visit the site are then asked to rate a select number of  songs on a scale of 1 to 5. Tallies are kept on each song, and through a process  of elimination, songs are slowly dropped from the rating system until there is  only one song left.

In February, that one song was from Monovox.

"Once we were in the final countdown, we really got interested," said lead  guitarist Matthew Schaefer. "It's bad because there is nothing you can do, you  just sit there. And you can't cheat. Believe me, we looked into it. All we could  do was just sit there and watch the reviews come in."

Come in they did, making Monovox the No. 1 rated band on the site.

Since then, everything has worked out nicely for the group. Despite the bad  piece of advice, the manager kept his job and the Madison, Wisconsin, band is  finishing up its first album with its new label.

This hasn't been their first successful flirtation with the Web, although the  garageband.com success certainly has the looks of being much more lucrative than  past endeavors.

Originally formed under the name JJWar in 1994, the quartet fled Fond du Lac,  Wisconsin, and the following year headed off to Chicago with dreams of hitting  it big. While working on the first CD, Burlap and Broadcast, the group  put up their first home page and discovered a novel way to make a living.

"To pay the bills, we were able to do Web design and make money," Schaefer  said. "Not only did we use the Internet to promote the band, it's how we paid  for our gear and for our van. We got really good at Web design really quickly.

"Once we learned how to do Web design for ourselves, we just started farming  it out to other bands," he said. "We started teaching other bands how to design  their Web pages and that money then got turned right back around and we bought guitars. That was how we lived and worked."

Of course, if the garageband.com gig works out, there won't be too much Web  designing in their future. While the band is in the studio recording their new  album, they continue to negotiate with the music company over rights, although Schaefer said he expected few problems.

"You always want to make sure that no matter what happens, you never have it  where things being presented to you are being owned and controlled by people  completely outside of the band," Schaefer said. "But I don't think they are going to give us one album and then hang us out to dry if it doesn't sell well."