Dashboard Confessional frontman Chris Carrabba says he “wouldn’t have a career” without the illegal music download sites of the noughties.
The emo band formed in 1999 and scored a number two in the US with their 2003 LP ‘A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar’, and although singer Chris, 49, acknowledges that music piracy sites such as Napster and LimeWire were bad for business for many, but he also believes that his music wouldn’t have been heard by the masses if they didn’t exist.
Taking part in NBC News Studios’ ‘My Generation’, he said: “There’s no question Napster affected the record industry, and it was a negative effect in a lot of ways, but not for me.
“My records came out on a small label. It had limited distribution. If you had found out about my band, there wasn’t any place you could go get my music if you wanted to.
“If it hadn’t been for people having had a way to share my music, I wouldn’t have a career of any kind.”
On what led to the resurgence of emo in the 2000s, he added: “The emo scene came up from a need to dig deeper inside yourself.
“Young people, you’re suddenly grappling with a world that is now changed forever.”
Dashboard released their ninth studio album, ‘All The Truth That I Can Tell’, in 2022, their first in four years.
The ‘Screaming Infidelities’ hitmakers have inspired a whole host of bands, including pop punk group Busted, who got Chris to feature on a new version of their track ‘Everything I Knew’ on their 2023 ‘Greatest Hits 2.0’ collection.
Busted’s Charlie Simpson previously told Kerrang!: “We were really excited about that one because we don’t really have a connection to [Chris Carrabba] – it was just like, ‘Send it to him and see what he says.’ We’re the biggest Dashboard fans, and we were so excited about that one.”