Bands are achieving unprecedented hype

If you follow rock music, you know that the British pop-punk band Arctic Monkeys, who play at the Paradise tonight, are the most exciting group since Oasis, the Clash, the Beatles, and (insert the name of your favorite artist). They are pretty much the best thing to happen to rock since the power chord, according to the intercontinental tidal wave of praise. If you read newspapers, subscribe to magazines, or tune in to NPR, you've heard the buzz.

If you're part of the online music community, however, you were hip to Arctic Monkeys before the press or the record labels or the record shop buyers had even heard the band's name. In fact, you created them.

Hype is as old as entertainment. In the pop music business, generating buzz has largely been the domain of a record label's marketing department and involved a time-tested triptych of tools: radio, reviews, and video rotation. As the alternative nation grew, intrepid fans traded recordings of favorite underground bands, generating word-of-mouth campaigns that turned groups like Pavement into cult stars.

Today, thanks to the confluence of Internet file-sharing technology, online blogs, and social networking websites such as MySpace, the grassroots community has swelled, quite literally, to global proportions. Instead of talking up bands and handing out tapes to friends in your town, music enthusiasts send the word, and the MP3 files, to cyber-pals around the world.

All Arctic Monkeys did was post some demos on their website and make them available for free download. By the time the band members signed a deal with the English indie label Domino last year, their audience was already huge. ''Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not," released in the UK in January, broke a record for first-week sales in Britain.

This is good news in so many ways. After decades of being force-fed label-sanctioned product via corporate-approved radio, music consumers are more than ready to become programmers of their own playlists. And it's nothing short of a revolution in terms of opportunities for independent artists. The Boston-bred, Brooklyn- and Philadelphia-based group Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sparked a full-blown blog-based frenzy (and, in turn, remarkable sales figures) for last year's self-released, self-distributed, self-promoted debut album via the Internet.

No packaging. No pitching. No payola. The notion of a band finding a fan without the machinations of middlemen inspires utopian visions of art uncorrupted, a power-to-the-people model of music making and consuming. But while Web-generated hype may be more credible than the carefully crafted fluff coming out of boardrooms, it isn't without its pitfalls. First of all, the mainstream catches on soon enough, which is what happened with Arctic Monkeys. The English press, notorious for championing and abandoning bands on a weekly basis, outdid itself with hyperbole. The US press, notorious for looking to Britain for the Next Big Thing, followed suit.

With bloggers and online sources assuming, more and more, the role of tastemakers, Internet buzz often precedes mainstream press coverage -- which could account for the second-wave fervor bordering on desperation.

Radio got wind of the hoopla, an onslaught of labels came courting, and all of a sudden four kids from Sheffield, barely out of their teens, are being touted as the saviors of rock 'n' roll.

Instant stardom is not what the bandmates, or the British indie label they've signed with, had in mind. Next Big Things rarely are -- just ask the Libertines, the Darkness, Clinic, Starsailor, Dogs Die in Hot Cars, the Futureheads, or the Kaiser Chiefs, recent anointees all. Cross your fingers for the Subways and Magic Numbers. The vanishing act is generally as swift and startling as the rise, which is why Kris Gillespie -- who runs the US operations of Domino Records -- met with programmers at high-profile radio stations across the country in January and delivered an uncharacteristic request: to stop playing Arctic Monkey's music.

''The job over the last three months has been to keep a lid on things," says Gillespie. ''To not let the hype build up. We get calls from the 'Today' show and CBS morning news. That's not the band's ideology."

For the record, Arctic Monkeys made a fine first album. It's sharp and exhilarating, at once an homage to the past -- specifically 2001, when the Strokes were rock's great hope -- and thoroughly of the moment: stylized, succinct, and stuffed with information.

But where can Arctic Monkeys hope to go after this? What's left to achieve after your musical baby steps have been pronounced the pinnacle of verse and chorus? The sophomore slump is a given; the prognosis is grim. This is the dark side of hype: Arctic Monkeys are doomed to fail because they've done so well, so fast.

ARE THEY WORTH THE HYPE? Check out audio clips and sound off about hot new bands at www.boston.com/ae/music

That poor prognosis, of course, presumes that longevity is a criterion for success. We're living in the age of disposability. The culture, the computer file, the tastes and trends move at hyper-speed in cyberspace. The beauty is that every band can have a MySpace page; every artist can potentially deliver her song to a fan. But that artist is competing with every other artist online, vying for the attentions of an audience -- there are tens of millions of registered members on MySpace -- fluent in the high-tech entertainment marketplace, where there's always another band to discover, another song to be the first to tell your friends about.

The question that remains to be answered is whether fans will invest in long-term relationships with artists, or if -- with a new song a keystroke away -- they're likely to be as fickle as the UK press and as inclined, ironically, as the major labels to focus on whatever's new.