Bon Iver’s Breathtaking Beauty, Brought to You By the Network Age

A couple weeks ago I stumbled across a profile of Justin Vernon’s musical platform Bon Iver. It wasn’t in Pitchfork, or City Pages, or The Onion. Believe it or not, it was in fact the Wall Street Journal. My colleague Paul Isakson had turned me on to Bon Iver last year, lending me a copy of For Emma, Forever Ago. I had become an ardent fan of Bon Iver through that word of mouth; the album is a masterpiece full of gut-wrenching, heart-rending songs about love and loss. Delicate and urgent, it’s acoustic guitars and layered vocals float against a backdrop of subdued, ethereal electric guitar textures. Simple drums are placed only where needed to drive the emotion. It is really a phenomenal album.

Justin Vernon of Bon Iver

So why the profile in the Wall Street Journal? Is Vernon also a financial planner who predicted the current recession? The profile is focused on the way Bon Iver achieved such critical success in such short order. That is to say, the Internet. Although it shouldn’t be news to anyone at this point that the rise of interactive media has upended the marketing and distribution channels of art and entertainment, I just can’t stay away from a good success story. There are so many Bon Iver’s out there who even a decade ago would never have made it out of their backyard. And yet here’s Vernon, recording his heart out on a computer in his parent’s cabin in Northern Wisconsin, and lo and behold, the work actually found it’s way into the world.

Vernon received great interest after posting the songs on MySpace (oh yeah, WSJ, MySpace… now I get it. Well I ripped MySpace enough in my last post, so I guess this evens it out). In his own words, the buzz spread “like wildfire” – and Bon Iver was on the map. Now Vernon had played in a band previously and so he had a credible platform, but nevertheless, the immediate impact within the digital landscape was substantial, allowing Bon Iver to sign with an Indie label and release the album in real space. He has since toured heavily and appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, and the album has sold nearly 100,000 copies and landed in the Billboard Top 200. The people-powered network has catapulted Bon Iver from the woods of Northern Wisconsin to Paris, to Australia, and to the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theater – in one album’s time. Bon Iver’s newest album, Blood Bank, is slated for release in a just a couple weeks.

As Shakespeare said, the truth will out. Never has it been truer than in the network age.

References:
Chart Info on Wikipedia