NASCENT

MySpace (listen to “Heck No,” “He Said, She Said”)
Official site
Hometown: Oakland
Next local show: 2/17, Slim’s
Recent release: Malfunction EP, 2006

Looking at the above picture of Maldroid, you may be asking yourself: What’s up with the brown suits? And the painted briefcase? And why is the band posing in front of a row of Gibson guitars? Good questions, all…good questions with very good answers. To find them, we direct you to this cover story on Maldroid that was published today in the East Bay Express.

The EBX story will tell you all you ever wanted to know — and didn’t realize you needed to know — about Maldroid, an Oakland rock group that in the last three months has taken an utterly unique path to success. There may be no other band quite like it in the history of the music biz, and that’s no hyperbole.

The short version? After two years of planning and preparation, Maldroid was launched to national success — including being interviewed on Good Morning America and meeting with major labels — before it had played a single live show or released a single song for sale. This may sound like an anomaly or a stroke of luck, but it’s neither: Founder and lead singer Ryan Divine planned at the band’s conception three years ago to build Maldroid on music videos. YouTube, the platform that would eventually put the band before millions of eyes (again, no hyperbole), didn’t even exist at the time he started working on his first video.

To read more, and to check out some great photos of the band, read the Express story.

BY THE NUMBERS:
-Maldroid’s first video, for “He Said, She Said,” has earned over 700,000 views on YouTube since early October. Most of those came after the contest win was announced in late November.
-Its second video, for “Heck No (I’ll Never Listen to Techno!),” has earned over 900,000 views since January 1. The majority have come since early February, when, in the span of five days that the video was posted on the YouTube homepage, its view count totalled 700,000.
-Maldroid’s digital EP, Malfunction, has sold over 800 downloads through the iMusicast website.
-News 3/30/07: Maldroid signs to SF indie label Fuzz.