Faking the Band

WANT TO BUY “ALL SUMMER LONG” FROM ITUNES? EVEN IF YOU DID, IT WOULDN’T BE KID ROCK’S HIT VERSION—JUST A GENERIC SOUNDALIKE (SORRY, TRIBUTE). DAVID PEISNER

BLOWS THE COVER OFF ONE OF POP’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS.

ANONYMOUS MESSAGE BOARD POSTINGS AREN’T EXACTLY A reliable barometer of public opinion, but anyone who logged on to i Tunes on August 24 to buy the site’s sixth-most-popular song couldn’t help but be struck by the near unanimity of attitude toward the track in question.

“Ahhh this STINKS! Why is it in the top 10??” wrote “coleenybeany.”

“THIS IS TERRIBLE!!!! PEOPLE ONLY BUY THIS CUZ THEY DESPRETLY WANT THE SONG!” offered “rickie H Lime.”

A poster going by the deceptively erudite moniker “PoliSciBA” chimed in with “i Tunes s-u-x winkies! What a joke.”

The comment board beneath i Tunes’ 17th-most-popular song was a similar cavalcade of gratuitously punctuated, caps-lock-crazy vitriol. Surprisingly, neither track was the work of Pussycat Dolls or Nickelback, or any other polarizing figure likely to incur copious dollops of online scorn simply for existing. In fact, nobody knew a thing about the bands that played on these tunes—not even the musicians’ real names. That, it seems, was the problem. As “Melissa87” put it: “Ick! who r the hit masers anyway?”

The “hit masers” were in fact Hit Masters, a group of studio musicians who’d recorded a soundalike cover of Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” and released it on i Tunes on August 12. By the 24th, due almost entirely to the fact that Kid Rock refuses to allow his own recordings to be sold by the digital retail giant, Hit Masters had moved more than 100,000 downloads of their version, which was perched at No. 6 on

the i Tunes chart. Kid Rock probably wasn’t bothered. As he put it to industry pundit Bob Lefsetz in a typo-pocked e-mail that suggested very little cultural distance between himself and the average i Tunes commenter: “THIERS plenty of ways to have big sales without itunes.…I just proved it.” By September, “All Summer Long” had propelled sales of his 2007 album, Rock N Roll Jesus, to two million units.

Rock’s label, Atlantic, tried to repeat this feat with another artist, Estelle, whose slinky, Kanye West–assisted R&B shuffle “American Boy” had been a breakout hit for the British singer. The tune had been selling briskly on i Tunes until August 20, when the label suddenly removed it in an attempt to jolt the previously unimpressive performance of Estelle’s album, Shine. It didn’t work—Shine’s sales actually dipped—but fans kept buying “American Boy,” albeit a version recorded by a group dubbed Studio All-Stars. Four days later, their take, which features an impressive Estelle impersonator and an atrocious Kanye one, had worked its way to No. 17 on the list of i Tunes top-sellers.

“It’s a major surprise that it’s on the charts,” says Michael Infante, chief executive for One Media Publishing, the company behind the “American Boy” cover, which had been available since mid-July but had sold only 17 copies before Estelle’s original was pulled from i Tunes. “These things are not put up to fill a void. We don’t do an analysis of the market and then fill the gaps. I mean, I wasn’t even aware the original wasn’t available. This is more of a fluke.”

68 NOVEMBER 2008 WWW. SPIN.COM

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEREMY LIEBMAN