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Comment by kilian | Hacker News Reader

The way I see it, this is just an entrepreneur being very passionate about his product, and some too-cool-for-school kids make jokes about it.

I submitted the (full) source article to HN a couple of hours ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1034444

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The journo's point wasn't about the pitch, the site itself or a "too cool for school" reaction from VW, it's about the band staring their own future in the face.

Blink-182 was a massively (far more so than VW) successful act, yet one of the members of the band is now hawking a web site instead of making music. It's an anecdote about the state of the industry and how that affects those currently caught in the machine.

[I can't imagine why he would even pitch to the artists in the first place; for an act of that size, that's the management, label and booking agent's territory.]

You nailed it.

I think 'successful act' should be changed to 'profitable act'.

How do you define success in the music industry?

To me it means the following things: making a career out of playing music (even just for the short term), being profitable both for yourself and your label/team, being heard by a large amount of people (this includes touring and sales) and getting mainstream radio/tv play. And managing to make more than one record that gets at least a 50% positive critical response.

He's still pretty successful- Angels and Airwaves gets plenty of radio play.

I've been pretty good friends with one of the band members of VW since college, and I don't think the comments stem from a "too-cool-for-school" mindset.

I remember one of my nerd friends and I talked about our approach for a poker bot to this member of VW, and he was extremely interested in the idea, even though he didn't have a technical background.

The thing that really bothers him, though, is "inauthenticity", and having a mainstream music band member play a web entrepreneur would probably elicit jeers.

Does he consider Blink 182 to be more "mainstream" than Vampire Weekend?

Hrm... one writes songs about handjobs, the other, the Oxford comma.

Vampire Weekend is definitely more current, I'll give em that.

One does bog-standard 3-chord power-pop-punk with standard 'rebellious' studded-crap accouterments, the other does mellifluous afro-pop in menswear from a Wes Anderson character's closet.

Perhaps, but the social dynamics are made extra interesting by the fact that the "passionate entrepreneur" is the too-cool-for-school kid of a dozen years ago, and he's having trouble coping with it.

I'm not sure whether it's pathos or schadenfreude, but there's something fascinating about the weird approval-seeking behaviour exhibited by this former cool kid towards the new cool kids, especially given the enormous stylistic gulf between the two bands.

Not sure when Blink-182 was ever too cool for anything. If you listen to their concert record, you'll see that they did not take themselves very seriously.

Everyone seeks approval. I don't understand what slight Blink-182 did to you or the other people on this board that you would feel schadenfreude towards them -- normally such is reserved for people who have done you ill.

Neither of these are the source article, which isn't online. Your nymag link does appear to predate this one, but they're independent of one another: the New Yorker is not short on print subscribers.

You're right, my apologies. The names must have gotten me confused.

I didn't catch the jokes -- it all seemed very plausible to me.

I assume the joke was in the delivery. But I'd agree that the concept described in the retelling seems very reasonable. Delonge seems to be a non-technical entrepreneur attempting to pitch/address a pain point that he perceives in his industry - that is how to effectively engage an audience/following and interact in such a way as to extract full value (through future evangelism by the fans and future dollars).

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