Format Busters

Songwriting duo Nate Ruess and Sam Means had enough of major-label drama, so now they're calling the shots

A A A Comments By Michele Laudig Thursday, Jul 6 2006

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Dog Problems was an immediate success; the digital prerelease sold about 600 downloads in the first hour. Sales were over 2,000 in the first month.

Ruess was nervous at first. "All of a sudden, it was like, 'Oh, today's the day we're going to release our CD.' I hadn't even heard it. So I downloaded it and listened to it and had my moment of, 'Everything's gonna be great.'"

Mr. G

Nate Ruess and Sam Means of The Format

Mr. G

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Jim Adkins predicts that The Format will do well as a result of so much touring and securing a base of real fans. "It would be hard for them to go wrong in either case now because of that. You can try really hard, but you can't manufacture that — you can only earn that," he says.

Promoter Charlie Levy offers up a bunch of jaw-dropping stats as proof of the band's organic fan base. "On PureVolume, it had 717,559 plays of their music, and 445,756 people went to their profile page. That's crazy. It just shows that the Internet works. And on MySpace — 1,819,638 plays. Today, already 6,665 people have listened to their music." As of press time, those numbers had gone up even more.

"I assume that people want to be fans of music nowadays. At least that's what I'm hoping — that change is gonna come, and it comes back to not whether you have a video on MTV or a song on the radio," Ruess says.

"And if the record is successful," he adds, "it'll sort of be an 'I told you so.'"

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