Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda – HuffPost 7.25.12

Mike Ragogna: Mike, what advice might you have for new artists?

Mike Shinoda: It’s hard for me to give advice to new artists, because the industry environment we grew up in was so different. We were coming up playing shows at little clubs and everything. We’d put out a sign-up list to keep in touch with the band, and more than half of the list would sign up with their home address and phone number because they simply didn’t have email yet. When we came up with the name Linkin Park, we wanted to go with the presidential spelling but we chose L-i-n-k-i-n because we wanted to get the domain “.com.” There really wasn’t a Google yet. So if you can imagine coming from that and everything that’s happened since then, we’ve had to roll with it and really stay in touch with our fans, stay in touch with the technology, and try and stay ahead of the curve. I think that amount of perspective makes it tough for me to tell young artists what to do because we’re so used to just keeping our eye on what the next thing is, and a lot of these folks are growing up with those things being a reality. But a lot of that stuff aside, clearly, the thing that has always been a focus for us is making sure your songs are where everything is based on. You could have the best promotion in the world, you could get name-brand producers and video directors, whatever. Young artists are always aspiring to get with somebody else who is talented and say that that’s going to take their band to the next level. But truthfully, these days, with the direct-to-fan relationship you can build these days online, that stuff is less and less important. We built our thing on making our own music, making our own videos, doing everything ourselves to any degree that we can, and if all the other stuff went away, I feel like we’d still be pretty autonomous. I think that’s the lesson for young artists.