Bloghouse and Indie Sleaze

A Paris college radio station ran a remix contest for Simian's “Never Be Alone” in 2003. Two unknown producers entered. Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay gutted the track and rebuilt it with slapped bass and compressed synth stabs that sounded like they'd been forced through a guitar amp. It didn't win. Pedro Winter, who was managing Daft Punk at the time, heard it and signed Justice on the spot to his new imprint, Ed Banger Records. The label had launched that year as a division of Headbangers Entertainment, out of a Paris office where Winter, working under the alias Busy P, was assembling a roster that treated electronic music like punk rock: raw, referential, loud on purpose.

By 2006 the machinery for moving music had quietly changed hands. Nearly 60% of Americans had internet access, up from 40% just six years earlier. Bloggers posted daily streams on sites like Hype Machine, Hipster Runoff, and Music for Robots, often dropping a MediaFire or zShare link underneath. The gatekeepers weren't A&R reps or radio programmers anymore. They were anonymous writers with Blogspot accounts. Promoters booked acts on blog buzz alone, sometimes before those acts had played a single show. Chromeo's Dave 1 summed up the split: “It was Billboard versus Hype Machine: the mainstream press covered them, the blogs covered us.”