STARPOLISH: You have a great official website , plus something called Slidelines? Is that a website?
LANDRETH: Well, actually there's only one official website. Slidelines is the name of the newsletter that Tom [Mouton] puts out; he does all the text for me.
STARPOLISH: I guess a good question for you would be how involved are you in the website, and how has the rise of the Internet and the ability to have a website affected your career and your relationship to your fans?
LANDRETH: The actual creation of the website has been in the hands of some wonderful people. Megan Barra designed it, Scott Long constructed it, and Tom handles all the text. But believe me, I am involved in every aspect of it. I was very keen on getting it off the ground. The potential of what you can do and convey and communicate to people is so significant that it bears the time and the trouble and the expense. Besides it being a very convenient way for people who are interested to find anything out about an artist — they can log on to a website and get so much information — it also is a great way to really breaks the ice and get more of the picture.
The end result of all of that is the amazing connection that you make with people on an individual basis. For example, we play a gig in Montreal, at the Montreal Festival, during the summer, and there are literally thousands of people that show up for the gig, and it's just an amazing experience. And that night they're already communicating back to my website that they were there, and posting their individual stories of what they got out of it. I mean, the next day they are telling me about it. I think that's amazing... that type of immediate exchange is incredible.
STARPOLISH: It also seems like it breaks down some of the barriers between an artist and the fans...
LANDRETH: Well it does, because all that stuff we were talking about — everything that gets in between... I think this is part of the change going on, and you have a more personal connection to people. And that's what it's really all about in the first place — and that's what I like about it.
STARPOLISH: Is it also a way for artists who are not on a major label, and who might have some of the distribution issues that you eluded to earlier, to sell albums and merchandise that they otherwise couldn't under the old system?
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1 - jorge luis
hola