Spokane Local Planet
June 10, 2004
by Jeremy Hadley


The dot-com bubble busted—but don’t tell that to Jason Munning.

“We all quit our day jobs just about a year ago,” says Munning of he and his Ten Mile Tide bandmates, who have managed to exchange their respective cubicles and offices for the world of rock clubs and coffee shops. And they owe it all to the Internet, claims Munning.

Eight years ago, he and his twin brother Justin—then fresh-faced high school grads from Lewis and Clark’s class of 1996—headed for the campus of Stanford University, right in the middle of that late-‘90s techno siren song known as Silicon Valley.

“When we got to Stanford, the whole dot-com boom was happening right in front of us,” says Munning. “The Internet was really getting huge, and more and more sites were popping up right around us.”

Many of those sites focused on music and the brand-new world of file sharing. So when the Munning twins formed Ten Mile Tide in 1999 along with four of their Palo Alto pals, the goal was to form a “folk-inspired rock” outlet for songs equally influenced by the folksy songwriter standards of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and the psychedelic jam-band influences of the Allman Brothers and The Dead. Not long after, they began posting Ten Mile Tide mp3s on Web sites, exchanging them with people on file-sharing services like Napster. And when Napster was forced to shut down free exchange operations, the Munnings and Ten Mile Tide found the file-sharing program Kazaa. That discovery, claims the band, is quite possibly the reason why they call Ten Mile Tide their new day jobs.

“We put our stuff on Kazaa, and we pretty much just watched it take off from there,” says Munning. “It was crazy. The first week, it was like 10 downloads. The next week, it was 100. The week after that, 1,000. The next week, 10,000.” Not only, says Munning, was the band literally watching their music gain national distribution, but they were getting feedback from places they’d never heard of. “All of sudden, we’re sitting in our cubicles getting emails from people all over the world about our music.”

Eventually, Ten Mile Tide would hit the 10 million download mark, quickly earning them the attention of CNN, the Denver Post, and the hippie rock rag Relix Magazine for the role of digital distribution in their successes.