AVC: How do you see the profession of ‘musician’ changing in a world where the record industry is not longer paying bands’ salaries?

SM: We actually talk about this a lot, because the cost of living [in Rock Island] is so cheap and every band comes in here, broke as fuck. We’re like, “Why do you live in Brooklyn then?” Some of these bands just need to figure things out a little differently, because if you want to live in Brooklyn or somewhere exciting where the cost of living is just through the roof, you have to find creative ways of making money off of your music.

AVC: What makes Daytrotter different from some of the other live recording projects out there, like Clear Channel’s AT&T Blue Room, for instance?

SM: We’ve come to understand that the way we do sessions here is completely different from the way most big radio station do them. We record everything to analog tape, we have tons of gear for them to use, and we let them take their time. We’ve never once told a band to play a specific song, and the artists retain all of the rights to their sessions. They own these recordings, and we like operating that way because bands can use the sessions to hopefully make some money.

AVC: What’s an example of a band using the recordings to their advantage or doing something really interesting with them?

SM: Will Oldham used a Daytrotter session track as the B-side to one of his singles on Drag City – that was kind of a thrill for us to have him want to do that. Casiotone For the Painfully Alone released one of his sessions on vinyl, and Okkervil River has a Christmas CD that they’re putting on their website for the fans, which includes a couple of Daytrotter songs. Bands can do whatever they want with the recordings, but we’ve got some interesting ideas we want to launch in the next year. We’re turning 2 years old, and we’re thinking of retiring some of the older sessions from the website and then bringing them back a little while later in a higher quality mp3 that we’d sell for a small fee, with the majority of the money going to the band.

AVC: Daytotter doesn’t encourage or discourage bands from doing anything they want to with their sessions. Did you find that right away, most artists wanted to try alternate versions or new songs when they were in your studio?

SM: I think it’s just the nature of bands that are touring – the record that you’re touring for is one you probably recorded six or seven months ago, so there’s bound to be new songs or different versions of old songs. It’s probably a combination of boredom setting in and the chance to play on all of our collected vintage instruments that they may not have back home. Now that the site has been up for a couple of years, the bands that come in here are familiar with the recordings we make here and have an idea of how they want to use the room.

AVC: It seems like recording a Daytrotter session has almost become a ‘rite of passage’ for touring bands.

SM: Oh, I hope that’s true! We’ve been pretty honored by the reactions we’ve gotten in these first few years – people have compared what we do to John Peel. I think there are quite a few differences, but what we really appreciate about that comparison is that Peel really made a difference and we really feel like we can make a difference in helping bands. It’s bittersweet because the fatality rate of young bands is so high right now – so many great bands don’t make it past a second record, and we hope we can help more bands reach that goal of making music their life. That’s what John Peel did – he was a great champion of worthy, talented artists.

AVC: Another of the most lasting things about John Peel is that he was relevant right up to the end of his life. How do you find new music, and is it a goal for you to break new bands?

SM: I hope we can do that. I try to schedule the postings of the sessions so that we can get a little extra exposure for the smaller bands that we have a hunch about. For instance, earlier this week we posted a Sunset Rubdown session that we knew would be big no matter what, and so the next session we posted was Butane Variations, a great band that most people probably haven’t heard of.

AVC: How do you plan to expand Daytrotter’s audience in 2008?

SM: Right now we’re talking to Bruce Warren from World Café in Philadelphia about doing a weekly half-hour Daytrotter show on NPR, which we think would be really fun. I’ve always believed that it’s too bad that this music isn’t reaching everyone who might njoy it. There’s nothing wrong with a 50-year-old digging Richard Swift, and there’s a lot of music that we feature on our sight that doesn’t have to be exclusive to college-aged indie kids. That’s I think that the majority of our readership are people who already know bands like Okkervil River and Cold War Kids, but there are plenty of people out there who have never heard of those bands. You’ll never convince me that someone who loves The Beatles or the Rolling Stones won’t be able to get into, like, Dr. Dog. It’s not gonna kill them, and they might even like it.

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