Thanks to Matt Rowles, Georgia State is going viral.
IndieATL, a Web-based series of live music sessions recorded at the Digital Arts Entertainment Lab studio, has reached its highest viewership yet. According to Rowles, its YouTube page now garners more than 1,200 daily hits.
The project is a collaborative effort between the DAEL and the university’s esteemed radio station, WRAS 88.5 FM. National and local indie acts are featured – and many videos travel the Web like blogosphere brushfire.
As the digital media coordinator at the DAEL, Rowles said, “I wanted to do something to promote the lab. But I’m a musician, so let’s do an ‘Austin City Limits’ deal, but for Atlanta. That’s kind of how it started.”
“Austin City Limits,” the Public Broadcasting System’s long-running live concert series, is taped at the University of Texas at Austin. The show’s hometown is a forerunning hub for indie music, but Atlanta is quickly catching up.
In the past five years, local acts like modern-day garage-rock icons The Black Lips and ambient shoe-gazers Deerhunter have been exalted to near-leadership status within the indie realm – and have revived the media’s attention and city-dwellers’ support for Atlanta’s local indie rock scene in the process.
In the midst of such success, Rowles’ timing was perfect.
“We have this large window that wraps around the side of the building,” Rowles said of the recording studio located at One Park Place. “We always kept the curtains closed because it’s a studio, and you know, it needs to be dark. But we had the idea of hey, let’s show everybody what we’re doing. We opened up the curtains, built a little stage and put bands in there.”
It may sound like an oxymoron, but there’s such a thing as indie giants. They’re the bands signed to smaller labels that earn press from national outlets like Rolling Stone and NPR. Eventually, some of these bands get picked up for soundtracks to major motion pictures and high-budget car commercials. When those acts perform in Atlanta, IndieATL snags many of them – including Fiery Furnaces, Adam Arcuragi, Bowerbirds and Gogol Bordello, to name a few.
And though many of the local bands showcased boast strong followings (like The Black Lips and one of the metal scene’s most beloved psych-metal bands, Zoroaster), IndieATL lends a helping hand to acts searching for recognition. The project simultaneously acts as a campaign for Georgia State’s film and video department while aiding the dissemination of Atlanta’s best fledgling musicians.
“If you look at the key word searches, most of my traffic comes from people looking for these specific national bands, like Drink Up Buttercup. The thing that helps Atlanta bands, being part of that mix, is that [their content] shows up in the related videos,” Rowles explained.
Rowles admitted that, in its primitive first year in 2007, the series only churned out about four videos. Though WRAS joined the effort early on when the project was still dubbed “Entertainment Research” (a first-stage name that Rowles said became too “cumbersome”), it took IndieATL until last year to find sure footing.
Aside from the guidance of the WRAS promotions director, IndieATL has always relied on volunteers — all of them Georgia State University students, alumni or staff. Elevated interest from charitable film and video aficionados and a strong commitment from WRAS’ promotions director have helped IndieATL expand over time.
Rowles doesn’t invest in traditional publicity, but sticks to Web-only promotional tools instead. With a YouTube page, blog, podcast, Twitter feed, Facebook account and Flickr album, Rowles has all of the social media bases covered.
Now in its third year, the increased consistency in production coupled with the solid WRAS relationship has planted IndieATL in a slingshot, ready to catapult into indie-world stardom.
