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From Spin.com
” Tom DeLonge is leading a double life.
The music world knows him as the perennially teenaged guitarist and vocalist of reunited pop-punk trio Blink-182, also featuring his longtime pals Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker. But in his spare time, he’s spending more and more time in a place you wouldn’t expect a guy with an arsenal of dick jokes to go: the boardroom.
Recently, DeLonge, 34, has been using words like “user-experience” and “monetize” to present his new company Modlife, a website that helps musicians control and profit from their image and merchandise while releasing their music for free.
“People just assume I’m some dumb punk rock kid running around naked,” he tells SPIN.
Hardly. And the latest release from DeLonge’s space-rock quartet Angels & Airwaves — a movie and album called LOVE — is Modlife’s key selling point. Modlife is helping the album (released for free on Valentine’s Day) recoup the $500,000 spent on its production, plus a portion of millions shelled out for LOVE the movie — a sci-fi epic to be released theatrically later this year. LOVE’s concept is also an uncharacteristic venture for DeLonge. Rather than the playful lyrics of Blink, DeLonge is going deep, exploring love, emotion, and human interaction and connection.
DeLonge dishes with SPIN.com about Modlife, LOVE’s concept, and Blink-182.”
Hey, Tom. You’ve become quite the businessman recently. Did you envision this for your career?
No. But what started as a hobby has grown into a real business with real people and families and mortgages. With Modlife, I’m hoping to help bands. So I’m very fortunate.
It’s like you’re leading two different lives. Is it awkward cracking nasty jokes after having become a family and businessman?
No, because I’m still that guy. My friends and I still go out, have some drinks and crack dick jokes and try to offend people. But then we talk about larger world concepts. It’s indicative of my generation — you’re smarter than people give you credit for but at the same time you don’t care if people give you credit at all.
Angels & Airwaves released LOVE as a free download. How are you making any money?
[Laughs] You know, if a band on a label sold a few hundred thousand copies of their record these days they wouldn’t make any money. But if a band can pump out 10 million copies of a record for free, and 50,000 of those fans come to the band’s website to watch pay-per-view videos or buy a t-shirt, that’s roughly $10 million in revenue per year. Modlife combines all these new revenues streams and that’s what financed our new album and movie — and we were the first band to use it. It’s a whole new economic equation and we’re trying to solve this music industry crisis from the inside, not from the top where the executives are.
Is there anything you’d like to tell those top executives?
It’s funny, as soon as Universal found out about Modlife they flew me to New York and had me present the technology to Universal Worldwide via satellite. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was all because Universal thought Modlife meant the end of their business. They were actually doing intelligence work — they’re scared to death.
What’s the concept behind LOVE?
We loved the idea of esoteric symbolism. Geometric shapes hold an energy pattern and scientists did some experiments, which say certain geometric shapes can affect matter around them. It’s simply because when a human looks at a shape, they instantly receive energy from their brain. So we reworked the geometric shape of the word “Love” (see here), so when people see that word it instantly provides energy. That was the foundation of how we built the album and the movie.
Heavy. Have you always been interested in this?
I’ve have. I’m interested in a lot of different things, but first and foremost I’m into the idea of human consciousness, and Angels & Airwaves is a byproduct of that. It’s an exciting time for a band like us, because I think young adults are interested in waking up to the world around them.
You’ve said that with LOVE you wanted to send chills down listeners’ spines. What music still sends chills down yours?
I’m a huge stadium rock fan, but I’m also a fan of everything from Massive Attack to Peter Gabriel, U2, the Police, Radiohead, and Coldplay. I’ve realized that I love all forms of music and get excited when any artist goes crazy and creates something that is an experience. As I’ve matured as an artist, I’ve realized how hard people work to deliver something like that.
Tell me about LOVE the movie.
It evolved into something much grander than originally planned — it blew our minds. The movie is meant to be a sonic and visual experience. The narrative crosses time and space. It’s a story of hope, love, and the interconnectedness between people. There are real actors and incredible cinematography. We recruited Oliver Stone’s editors, Darren Aronofsky’s sound designers, and specialists who worked on computer-generated imagery on Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. But we’re not competing with Avatar. It’s an independent film and it took us four years to film because the director built a space station by hand. It’s an art film that’s meant to further the ambition and message of the band.
Was LOVE influenced by your favorite sci-fi movies?
Oh, yeah. We’re huge Stanley Kubrick fans. The director of LOVE [27-year-old Will Eubank] used to be a cinematographer and he aspired to shoot scenes the way Kubrick would. So, LOVE has that Kubrick tonality to it, but this is not a Stanley Kubrick movie — there will never be another. At the same time,LOVE has a modern feel. For example: In one scene, these astronauts go through a wormhole sequence and you feel like you’re being slapped around inside your head by a sonic boom. It’s meant to have a juxtaposition from classic sci-fi movie to something more modern you might see in theaters now.
What’s the plan with Blink-182?
We have a lot of ideas and a lot of exciting stuff, but I’m so deep into the Angels & Airwaves stuff. There’s no news I’m going to release without the other guys.
During the recording of the first A & A album you were addicted to narcotic painkillers. How does it feel to look back at that time after coming so far?
I was going through a big change in my life, coming from a band that was gigantic to starting all over again. It wasn’t an easy thing for me and I said stupid shit in the press and made myself look like a moron. The only thing I can say is that, well, I am a moron and I do say stupid shit. I don’t believe that I’m better than anybody, but I do believe that I’ll try harder than most and I hope that people just join me for a little bit of a ride.
Two new shows have been added to the modlife tour page: House of Blues San Diego on May 27 and the Ventura Theatre on May 30.
From Billboard.com
It will be all “Love,” all the time for Tom DeLonge’s Angels & Airwaves this year. With the new “Love” album just out — and being distributed for free online — a feature film of the same name and plenty of touring, DeLonge tells Billboard.com that “we’ll keep working this record forever. There’s no stop as to what we can do and what kind of deals we can make.”
That begins with the tours, the first of which commences March 27 at the Bamboozle festival in Anaheim, Calif., and wraps May 28 in Las Vegas. “There’ll be a couple different tours on this record,” DeLonge reports. “This first one is promotion for the launch of the album. The second tour will come out after the movie goes theatrical, and that will be the big tour where we basically couple everything together. But this first tour is going to be exciting and will hearken back to our old catalog. I think this’ll be a great experience, and it might be some of the last to have with this band in these [theater]-size venues, so I’m excited to go and do this.”
DeLonge says director Will Eubank is currently finishing work on the “Love” film, a science fiction epic whose span reaches from the Civil War to the International Space Station and the end of Earth as we know it. May is “the absolute finish date” according to DeLonge, who says he’s negotiating with four movie studios about distributing “Love” and also has interest from the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals.
“The film festival thing,” DeLonge notes, “it’s really cool, and I would be honored to be in it. But my goal is for people to see it. I never really think I need to go out and get critics to love anything. I go straight for the fans. At the end of the day, that’s how I’m going to maintain being an artist, is if I can connect with my audience.
“I know our ambitions leave us out there for people to poke holes on our boat, but… We’ve been working on the movie for four years. We’ve been working on the album for a year and a half. We’re just doing it so people can have a little bit of an escape, and if people give us that chance, then we welcome it.”
DeLonge says he’s been pleased with the early reception for the “Love” album, which was downloaded nearly 300,000 times during the first 48 hours after its Valentine’s Day release. Fans willing to “donate” to AVA will also receive a version of the track “Hallucinations” remixed by DeLonge’s Blink-182 bandmate Mark Hoppus, while AVA hopes to make its documentary, “Start the Machine,” which is currently sold at its web site, available for digital download as well.
DeLonge, meanwhile, says he’s learning how to balance AVA and Blink-182, the latter of which is reportedly working on a new album after a 2009 reunion tour. “I’m up to my neck in Angels & Airwaves right now, so I don’t have anything to tell you about blink,” DeLonge says. “It’s been a little bit of a juggle that I honestly don’t have down yet. I never really thought of having two big bands to deal with. It’s a good problem to have, but it’s also very stressful… But I know I’m a really, really lucky guy and I’m just taking it one day at a time.”
From HiMyNameIsMark.com:
As more dates are announced, I’ll be adding them here.
20 August 2010–Lowlands Festival, Holland
21 August 2010–Area 4 Festival–Germany
22 August 2010–Highfield Festival–Germany
24 August 2010–Sporthalle-Hamburg, Germany
25 August 2010–Chiemsee, Germany
3 September 2010–2 Days a Week Festival–Wiesen, Austria
4 September I-Day Festival-Arena Parco Nord-Bologna, Italy
Subject to change. This is just the latest and greatest information I have right now.
From MTV
Tom DeLonge and company release Love as free download to reach more fans.
Joining the likes of Radiohead and Trent Reznor, Tom DeLonge can now be added to the growing list of platinum-selling rock musicians who are giving away their records for free. Angels & Airwaves’ third album, Love, was released free download this past Valentine’s Day on DeLonge’s musician-friendly social networking site, Modlife.
Fans can choose to make a small donation for the album, and in return, they’ll receive a bonus remix of the first single, “Hallucinations,” done by DeLonge’s Blink-182 cohort Mark Hoppus.
“We were really interested in the one thing that ties everybody together in a very scientific way but a spiritual way,” DeLonge told MTV News about the theme of Love, which was inspired by research the singer had done on the physiological effects positive energy can have on living things. “There’s a lot about our planet we don’t know — we kind of live on Pandora.”
After the record was pushed back from its Christmas Day 2009 release date, the band decided to drop it on February 14 to continue with the love motif — and giving the album away to fans also ties into the message the band is spreading.
“Love is the connection aspect,” guitarist David Kennedy said. “And if we can empower people, we can actually distribute more records that way.”
Since the band decided to record and release the album themselves, they got promotional assistance from companies ranging from music site Fuel.tv to Accurate Fishing, a manufacturer of fishing reels.
“This is a 100 percent independent record release, and I think because of the help, it will be by far our biggest,” said DeLonge, who has often promised big things from Angels & Airwaves.
To further justify the decision to self-release Love, DeLonge discussed how labels, in their effort to stop piracy and illegal downloading, limit access to the artists’ product to try to sell what they can. This only hinders the band’s potential to reach an audience in the long run, he said.
“If we have a free record and we push it out there rather than try to stop it, not only do we think that we can probably get probably 10, 20, 30 times more people to have it,” he said. “We can also make use of technology to try to change our business model.”
Angels & Airwaves’ new business model also includes plans to release a full-length feature film, also called “Love,” which is a thematic companion to the record. Although the band has given no official release date as of yet, the film is expected to make its debut online sometime next month.
All through April and May you can catch Tom with Angels and Airwaves touring with Say Anything on select shows. Ticket prices range depending on location.
Pre-sale for some the the following dates begins today, Wednesday Feb. 17th.
4/5 San Francisco, CA Warfield Theater
4/7 Seattle, WA The Showbox SODO
4/8 Portland, OR Roseland Theater
4/9 Vancouver, BC Vogue Theater
4/11 Edmonton, AB Edmonton Event Center
4/12 Calgary, AB MacEwan Hall Ballroom
4/14 Fargo, ND The Venue
4/15 Des Moines, IA Val Air Ballroom
4/16 Kansas City, MO Uptown Theater
4/17 Milwaukee, WI The Eagles Club
4/18 Minneapolis, MN Epic Nightclub
4/19 St. Louis, MO The Pageant
4/22 Columbus, OH PromoWest Pavillion
4/23 Cleveland, OH Time Warner Cable Amphitheater
4/24 Chicago, IL Aragon Theater
4/25 Cincinnati, OH Bogart’s
4/27 Detroit, MI The Fillmore Detroit
4/28 Toronto, ON Sound Academy
4/29 Rochester, NY Main Street Armory
4/30 East Rutherford, NJ Hoodwink Festival
5/2 East Rutherford, NJ The Bamboozle Festival
5/3 Baltimore, MD Rams Head Live
5/4 Boston, MA House of Blues
5/6 Washington, DC 9:30 Club
5/7 Philadelphia, PA Electric Factory
5/8 Wallingford, CT The Dome
5/10 Norfolk, VA The NorVa
5/11 Charlotte, NC The Fillmore Charlotte
5/13 Tampa, FL The Ritz
5/14 Pompano Beach, FL Pompano Beach Amphitheater
5/15 Orlando, FL Hard Rock Live
5/16 Atlanta, GA The Tabernacle
5/18 Houston, TX House of Blues
5/19 San Antonio, TX Sunset Station
5/20 Dallas, TX The Palladium Ballroom
5/22 Denver, CO Fillmore Auditorium
5/24 Salt Lake City, UT In The Venue
5/25 Tempe, AZ The Marquee
5/27 Los Angeles, CA Hollywood Palladium
5/28 Las Vegas, NV The Joint/Hard Rock Hotel & Casino
Check out Ticketmaster.com or LiveNation.com to find tickets for your date.
AvA will not be performing at SUNY Potsdam in Potsdam, NY on May 1st as has been sometimes been reported. Instead, the band will be playing at Bamboozle in New Jersey on that date. I hope this clears up any confusion.
On a rainy Tuesday evening in Angels & Airwaves’ suburban Carlsbad recording studio, singer Tom DeLonge pondered ice cubes. Specifically, the ice cubes made famous by the Japanese writer-mystic Masaru Emoto, who claimed that projecting positive vibes into water could make it freeze into more beautiful crystals.
“This guy taped pieces of paper with words like ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ to cups of water and froze them. When he looked at them under a microscope, the ones with ‘Hate’ looked chaotic, but words like ‘Love’ made them perfectly symmetrical,” DeLonge said. “So we thought, what if we could use our album to do that to people, who are made up of mostly water?”
Hence the epic, electronica-infused emo band’s new album, “LOVE.” Angels & Airwaves released it independently as a free download on Sunday, the latest in a string of multiplatinum rock bands — including Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails — to use new, free albums to build their brand and fans’ loyalty, instead of seeing them as profit-makers.
The album is just one facet of a larger business experiment for the band, which hopes to seamlessly incorporate pervasive social media and corporate sponsorships in ways that might make Naomi Klein shudder. But their approach could be a new avenue for self-sufficiency amid rock music’s commercial swan dive.
As appropriate for a band obsessed with science fiction, it’s all about trusting the Force. In this case, it’s the force of branding coupled with the allure of free content.
“We created this whole world around the band as a deep and philosophical adventure and immersed ourselves in it,” DeLonge said. “We personally went $500,000 in the hole on this album. But I believe music should be free. If I have to, I’ll go sell blood and sperm to make that happen.”
As the longtime singer and guitarist of recently reunited ’90s pop-punk titans Blink-182, DeLonge probably won’t have to hock his plasma any time soon. But it’s clear that Angels & Airwaves, founded after Blink’s breakup in 2005 in part as a healthful escape from DeLonge’s drug and personal problems at the time, holds his interest in different ways than his easygoing, frequently naked punk act.
“LOVE” is clearly a labor of such, where the planetarium-sized synthesizers of M83 bolster chiming arena-rock in the spirit of U2. The band members, including guitarist David Kennedy, bassist Matt Wachter and drummer Adam Willard, wear jackets emblazoned with the band’s logo while working in the studio. Lyrics like “Do you believe in hallucinations? Silly dreams and imagination?” purposefully invite the group’s young audience to join Angels & Airwaves in their stylized fantasy land.
But a walk around the band’s vast recording complex — which also houses the offices of DeLonge’s skate-shoe company Macbeth, and ModLife, a new social-media interface he co-founded — suggests Angels’ earnest music is balanced by a cool-eyed capitalist instinct. Once hooked, fans can invest in the band’s output at a variety of price points — from the free download of the album to pay-per-view concert streams to copies of their forthcoming feature-length film, a kind of “Event Horizon”-meets-”Avatar” CGI epic also called “LOVE.”
“I’m a businessman and I want this to be as big as it can be,” DeLonge said. “I felt we could do the business end of this better ourselves with new partnerships. We could strike a deal with Ford where they put a copy of the record in every new car and they use one of our songs in an ad. We can do anything we want, and I have no problem approaching this band as a venture capitalist.”
“Does a musician end up looking like a NASCAR driver at the end of all this?” DeLonge asked. “It’s up to them. I have no problem with corporations — I own two of them. It’s about letting the musician choose what’s best.”
As you know it ,FUEL.TV , will host Angels & Airwaves third studio album “Love” for free digital download 48 hours before it becomes available to the general public beginning at 6pm PT on Friday February 12th.
If you are a premium member on modlife, keep an eye out because you will have access to download the album before its exclusively released on Fuel.TV.
Time line for Fuel.Tv download
6pm PT – Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Whitehorse, Tijuana
7pm MT – Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Calgary, Yellowknife, Hermosillo, Ciudad Juárez
8pm CT – Chicago, Dallas, Guadalajara, Guatemala City, Houston, Managua, Mexico City, Minneapolis, New Orleans
9pm ET – Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Lima, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec, Quito, Toronto, Bogotá, Havana, Port-au-Prince
2am GMT – London, Dublin, Abidjan, Casablanca, Accra, Lisbon
3am CET – Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest , Vienna, Prague, Brussels, Kinshasa, Lagos, Madrid, Paris, Rome, Oslo
10am AWST – Western Australia, East Indonesia
11.30am ACST – Central Australia
Noon AEST – Eastern Australia
