The Real Story Of How Macklemore Got 'Thrift Shop' To No. 1 | Hacker News Reader

The Real Story Of How Macklemore Got 'Thrift Shop' To No. 1

npr.org

42 pointskumarski14 comments

"The story they've been telling is not entirely true"

On Colbert last Thursday they pretty clearly said they hired Warner to do promotion. I don't know if earlier they were saying something else, but it sure didn't seem like they were letting out a big secret.

The NPR story is from a few months ago. Were they so open about it before it was widely known? Perhaps they were, but when the NPR story came out in February there was a lot of (perhaps not totally accurate) other reporting about how groundbreaking it was for them to have a hit album "with no help from a label."

Music promotion is quite funny business. On the same note, The Quartz's article on Harlem Shake and how it went viral is a pretty interesting article to read: http://qz.com/67991/you-didnt-make-the-harlem-shake-go-viral...

They are pretty open about this and say that they were more concerned with retaining creative control.

I thought most people familiar with Ryan and Macklemore's story knew about this already. It's not entirely a secret they hired help from Warner (through ADA) to do promotion, they've been pretty open about it. The interesting and impressive aspect about the story of Ryan Lewis and Macklemore is that they were the ones hiring the label, not the label hiring and exploiting the artist like is usually the case.

What these two guys did was get a song to number one all without losing one single bit of creative control. The labels didn't tell them what their album should sound like, who it should be marketed too or what the first single should be, the label merely used their resources to get the song on the radio and the rest happened organically.

Thrift Shop was one hell of a catchy song, they deserve every bit of success they have. It was in the best interests of the label and Ryan and Macklemore to get the song out there. The song was rising up the iTunes charts and Youtube so fast before it hit the radio that the radio had no choice but to play it anyway.

The reality of music is you can't rely solely on digital music sales, physical mediums are still well and truly alive (on the decline but still alive and kicking). If you want to physically distribute music, labels which have been in the business for a long time like Warner Bro's have established supply chains that can get music manufactured and distributed faster than an independent artist manually burning CD's, printing, putting them in jewel cases and mailing them out ever could.

What do people expect? Did you expect Ryan Lewis and Macklemore to build their own manufacturing plant, purchase expensive printing and duplication equipment, hire employees to package their music up and then establish trade distribution agreements to get their music out there?

I hate to sound cynical, but this is shoddy journalism. It's like saying a company producing ground breaking medical equipment couldn't have succeeded without the help of Microsoft or Intel because the computers they used to document their research notes and build their CAD drawings on were Intel computers running Windows 7...

The journalistic standard of NPR is usually pretty good, but this article definitely subtracts a couple of points of respect that I had for them. Don't get me started on that link-bait title, "The Real Story Of How Macklemore Got 'Thrift Shop' To No. 1" — you can't say that's not a completely misleading title that insinuates that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis have been lying about some all aspects of their career.

The general gist of this comment is: they outsourced the promotion of their music to a label rather than being owned by the label. No secret, just intelligent. Definitely not a secret, read around, they've made this known. Recently on Colbert they essentially said just that as well. What's the issue here?

This comment is more informative than the original story. Thanks.

Absurdly lazy reporting.

I know next to nothing about the music industry - as do most people here I suspect. Your comment is unhelpful here without expanding on what about it was lazy reporting.

The first comment on that article brings up a good point, that it was because the song was becoming so famous and popular on Youtube/iTunes that radio stations were forced to play it, it wasn't that this reality was arranged by some key players who're the ultimate deciders on what ends up getting radio airplay and what not:

For those of us deeply established in Seattle hiphop music; we know this post is not "the real story". In fact, it is completely unfactual and more than misleading. Macklemore is an independent artist who, along with Ryan Lewis, earned the Number 1 spot, first on iTunes and then confirmed on Billboard. Radio had no choice but to add the Thrift Shop single - or face being confirmed as an out dated form of music discovery. Major music Industry is no longer the sole means of entry into the fold. I find it amazing how large format Media tries to explain away how an upstart dared to do this while turning down Diddy, Jay Z and Interscope offers along the way.

Macklemore has worked very hard for years to achieve this feat, and he should be celebrated. Any analysis at this point should be from a place of admiration and not denegration, as the title of this post attempts to do.

The comments of the NPR article suggest that the reporting is misleading at best, wrong at worst, and isn't news (the facts were reported months ago).

Edit: to expand on the comments in the NPR piece- Macklemore and Ryan Lewis didn't sign with a label to get distribution, they stayed independent despite hiring ADA (a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group) to get them distribution.

Anyone who reads the article should easily see why it was lazy. The article is titled "The Real Story of How Mackelmore Got to Number 1". Maybe I'm spoiled by the New Yorker, Atlantic, Slate, Vice, etc..., but when I see something billed as the "real story" I expect more than a half dozen paragraphs. The only "story" in this report is one sentence saying that they hired Warner Music to get more radio play. There are no further details and that seems extremely lazy to me.

What I'm most curious about is whether the reporting was just bad, or intentionally so. After all, npr, while an upstanding organization, is still "traditional media".

Rather than be contractors to a record label (the traditional relationship as I understand it), they outsourced promotion to a record label.

Astroturfing music.

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