How Wilco helped invent streaming with ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’
Every major rock band has had the fear of being screwed over by their label. Throughout music history, the industry side of the business has always been known to go for the lowest common denominator, looking for a track that will serve the bottom line rather than anything that will leave a sharp impact. Although Wilco had their hangups with their label for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, what they would do with their music transformed the music business as we know it.
Throughout the film I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, fans got an in-depth look at what Wilco’s creative process was like going into the creation of the album, with the band getting increasingly frustrated with how their label was treating them. Even though Jeff Tweedy was working on songs that would become classics like ‘Jesus Etc’ and ‘Ashes of American Flags’, the sharp deadline for the album led to the label threatening to drop them if they didn’t deliver a decent product.
Rather than go down the traditional route of promoting their record, Tweedy and the band resorted to the early Internet to garner hype for their new project. Since the release date of their album was tied up in legal disputes with Reprise Records, Wilco began to release MP3 files shortly after cutting ties with their label, creating some of the first file-sharing services for their upcoming project.
Then again, Wilco never saw the file-sharing as a gimmick to get out of their label deal. To ensure that fans got the best sound quality for their music, Wilco streamed the entirety of their new album on their website, which created a surge of traffic for people eager to hear what the next phase of the band would sound like.
Despite its rootsy approach to rock and roll, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot became one of the first major online albums, garnering as much attention for how it was marketed as it did for the songs within. Even though Wilco may have won that particular battle with their record company, their approach to the Internet would drastically affect the music industry.
While file-sharing services may have been in their infancy with services like Limewire and Napster, Wilco’s approach felt like a more authentic way of getting music rather than piracy. It would only take a few more years before Spotify later sunk its teeth into the music industry, having the same approach to streaming that Wilco did, with a minimal percentage of the streams going to the artists.
Wilco’s approach to online engagement would also become a tool for other bands that had grown frustrated with their label. In the coming years, artists like Radiohead would put up In Rainbows on their website on a pay-what-you-want basis, while Trent Reznor gave away tracks on albums like the Ghosts series into the public domain.
Although streaming has drastically changed how artists and labels view music, Wilco’s need to get away from big business helped pave the way for where music would be heading. As artists turned to streaming and earning pennies for their work, the success of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot off of streaming was the ultimate power move Wilco could have played at that point.
