How an Underground Band Went National Before Social Media: How bands built audiences before social media

Retard-O-Bot came out of Tampa at the turn of the millennium, when building an audience still meant putting bodies in a van, records in a box and thousands of miles on the odometer.

If you wanted people in another city to know your band in the early 2000s, the most reliable method was to go there.

That strategy shaped an entire generation of underground musicians. Before Spotify recommendations, TikTok clips and cheap global distribution, bands built audiences geographically. You played Tampa until people knew who you were. Then Miami. Then Orlando. Gainesville. Jacksonville. Atlanta. Somewhere in North Carolina. Somewhere in Ohio. Eventually, if things went well and the van survived, the map started filling in.

That was the environment Retard-O-Bot entered after forming in Tampa in 1999.

The band was an odd proposition even by underground standards: synthesizers colliding with punk guitars, programmed electronics, screaming vocals, juvenile humor smashed into raw emotion, occasional genuine menace and a live show involving homemade robot costumes. The band's early versions of those costumes were made of an inexpesive silver insulation that looked like carboard on the outside. Fans eventually started arriving in robots of their own, many of which had roughly the life expectancy you would expect from corrugated cardboard entering a mosh pit.

There was no master plan for turning that into a national touring act. There was a local scene, a growing pile of songs, a network of bands and promoters, and the general assumption that if you wanted anything to happen, you had to do it yourself and keep moving forward.

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Tampa Was Where You Learned Whether the Idea Worked

A local music scene does a lot more than provide somewhere to play. It tells a band whether an idea survives contact with strangers.

Tampa Bay had plenty of places to test that in the late 1990s and 2000s. Ybor City, St. Petersburg and the surrounding area had clubs willing to book punk, industrial, metal, electronic and experimental bands that didn't always fit comfortably on the same bill. No Clubs Presents and venues such as the State Theatre, The Masquerade, and The Orpheum were part of the machinery that kept original music moving through the area.

For Retard-O-Bot, those rooms were where a bizarre little project gradually became a working band.

You learned which songs made a room move. You learned how to move and engage an audience. You learned how long it took to set up your equipment when another band was breathing down your neck. You learned whether anyone would buy the shirt after seeing the show. Most importantly, you started meeting people.

Bands met bands. Bands met promoters. Promoters recommended bands to other promoters. Somebody knew somebody in another city. A local opening slot turned into an out-of-town date. That date turned into three dates. Eventually there was a tour.

May 27, 2007 captures one small piece of that ecosystem: Retard-O-Bot playing the State Theatre in St. Petersburg with Tub Ring and Foxy Shazam.  Nobody looking at that bill today needs much explanation for why three bands that strange might have found one another.

Touring Was the Distribution System

By the middle of the 2000s, Retard-O-Bot was spending substantial stretches of time on the road, sharing tours and stages with bands including Mindless Self Indulgence, The Genitorturers, Combichrist, Creature Feature, Black Light Burns, Foxy Shazam, Tub Ring, Psychostick, Screaming Mechanical Brain, Kill Hannah and others.

That mattered because every tour solved several problems at once.

The obvious one was exposure. A band opening for a larger act could stand in front of a few hundred or thousands of people who had never heard its name at 8 p.m. and sell them a CD at 11 p.m. If ten of those people brought friends the next time through town, you had the beginnings of an audience.

But touring also created an informal national network. You learned which venues paid. You learned which promoters answered their phones. You learned which bands were worth traveling with and which bands mysteriously when duty called. You collected phone numbers, email addresses, couches to sleep on and vague promises about shows three months from now.

The music business at that level was intensely personal because it had to be. There wasn't much infrastructure separating the musician from the mechanics of being a musician.

Somebody booked the room. Somebody printed the flyers. Somebody counted the shirts. Somebody drove overnight. Somebody found out the MapQuest directions ended behind a warehouse.

And then you played.

The Audience Helped Carry the Band

The other half of the network was the audience.

People forget how active music fans had to be before every song was sitting in their pocket. Discovering a small band often required some effort, and spreading one required even more.

You bought the CD. You burned a copy for somebody. You wrote the band's name on a notebook. You posted about them on a forum. You handed somebody a flyer. You joined a street team. You wore the shirt until the graphic became unrecognizable.

In Retard-O-Bot's case, fans took a lot that into their own hands and became connected community, and built robot costumes together for shows or would stay at each other's houses across tour stops to follow the band.

That kind of participation was valuable precisely because it couldn't be manufactured at scale. And it's one of the ways how bands built audiences before social media. A person who spent an afternoon converting appliance boxes into a robot before driving to a club had crossed a fairly significant threshold of commitment.

Those people became part of the band's infrastructure.

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Then MySpace Showed Up

MySpace didn't invent online music promotion, but for independent bands in the mid-2000s it changed the pace dramatically.

Suddenly a band could put songs, photographs, tour dates and messages in one place where fans were already spending enormous amounts of time. More importantly, artists could communicate directly with listeners without waiting for a magazine, radio station or record label to introduce them.

In a 2006 interview, MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe described exactly how this was changing touring. A band with thousands of MySpace friends could announce a Tuesday show in Austin and arrive to find people waiting. He estimated that more than 660,000 artists and bands were already using the service at the time.

Contemporary accounts from touring musicians are almost comical now. Bands checked friend requests from internet cafés, promoters contacted artists through MySpace rather than email, and CDs sometimes listed a MySpace URL as the primary way to find the band online.

It was enormously useful, but it still worked differently from modern social media.

MySpace amplified a band's network. It didn't eliminate the need to build one.

The show still mattered. Touring still mattered. The merch table still mattered. If 20,000 people had added you as a friend but nobody turned up when you drove eight hours to play their city, the distinction between internet popularity and an actual audience became painfully clear.

Music-industry writers were already noticing that tension in 2006. Bands could accumulate impressive online followings while still sleeping on fans' basement floors and relying on shirt sales to keep a tour moving.

For Retard-O-Bot, MySpace arrived in the middle of something already underway. The internet made it easier to maintain contact with fans scattered around the country, announce shows and let someone hear the band before walking into the venue. But the touring network and the online network grew together.

Original MySpace Profile Image of Peter Pepper

Singer and frontman of Retard-O-Bot.

Original MySpace Profile Image of Benny Normal

Syth and bassist of Retard-O-Bot.

Original MySpace Profile Image of TJ Brainz

Drummer of Retard-O-Bot.

Somewhere Between Nowhere and Famous

One of the stranger things about looking back at independent music from that period is how much amazing effort and work can disappear from the historical record.

Retard-O-Bot never became a household name. Most people in America could have walked past the members at the mall or in an airport only noticing a a few angry looking Muppets and possibly an alarming amount of equipment besides them.

Yet the band toured nationally, shared bills with artists who went on to substantially larger careers. They received coverage in Alternative Press, sold records and merchandise through Hot Topic stores nationwide, and had music licensed for programming on MTV, ESPN and Cartoon Network.

There were thousands of bands living somewhere in this strange middle territory.

They weren't nobodies anymore, but they weren't super famous either. They might draw well in over a dozen cities, poorly in 6 and discover that fifty random people in some town nobody expected knew every single word. They could sell out of shirts and still worry about whether there was enough money to repair the van.

That level of the music business rarely gets romanticized because the history of rock tends to flatten everything into stars, one-hit wonders and bands that never got out of the garage. But between those categories was a huge working class of musicians who toured constantly, sold records, built regional and national followings, influenced other bands and helped create scenes without ever crossing into mainstream fame.

Retard-O-Bot spent years in that middle ground. There were people following tours, buying records, wearing the shirts, building robot costumes and bringing their friends with them next time the band came through town. And, people are still discovering their epic art/energy decades later. In some ways, that’s a more interesting legacy than a quick flash of mainstream attention.

There Was No Feed to Please: How bands built audiences before social media

There were obvious disadvantages to the old system. Touring was expensive. Distribution was difficult. Recording cost more. A band in Tampa could make something brilliant and have very limited ways of getting it to take traction in Seattle, much less another country.

Modern artists have access to tools that would have seemed absurd in 2003. A bedroom recording can reach every major streaming platform. Social media can put an unknown musician in front of millions of people. Analytics can show exactly where listeners live. A band can advertise specifically to people who already like five similar artists.

What disappeared along the way was some of the friction that forced scenes to form through repeated physical contact.

Retard-O-Bot didn't have to invent an elaborate content strategy to decide what should happen on Wednesday. Wednesday was probably Cleveland, or Philly, or where ever.

You went there. You played for whoever showed up. If they liked you, maybe there would be more of them next time.

There was a certain clarity in the uncertainty of it all.

Twenty Years Later, the Road Is Still There

The irony is that much of the work from that period now feeds the technology that replaced it.

A person discovering Retard-O-Bot today can open Spotify and encounter a catalog assembled over years of playing small rooms, national tours and local shows. They don't have to know which clubs mattered, which bands shared vans, how people found the music or why one strange Tampa group ended up mattering so much to a much larger network of electropunk and industrial acts. As far as the machine in concerned, they just do.

The recommendation engine only sees the finished map that the band had to painstakingly draw.

And before anyone could follow Retard-O-Bot with a smash of a like button, people had to actually follow them down the highway in their friend's car to the next town, and they'd have a blast doing it.

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