$5 Cover is yet another reality-based series, but don’t run screaming from the room. In contrast with most reality fare, the subjects here are not bickering morons but funny, smart people with actual talent who are trying to make a living playing original music.
The Bands:
• Champagne Champagne featuring rapper Pearl Dragon
Minimalist duo Corespondents
• “Anti-robot” rock band God
• Garage-rocking power trio The Lights
• Country rockers The Maldives
• Acoustic roots band The Moondoggies
• Musician/filmmaker Sean Nelson
• Punk/sci-fi rockers The Spits
• Dual-guitar quartet Tea Cozies
• Soul/rock hybrid Thee Emergency
• TheeSatisfaction (hip-hop duo Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White)
• Dance duo Weekend
• Harmonica and piano-flavored rock band Whiskey Tango MTV will unleash the entire second “season” of the show, which focuses on the Seattle music scene, in one massive launch Wednesday on the $5 Cover website. A dozen eight-minute episodes showcasing 12 bands will go live along with more than 50 auxiliary pieces of content, including documentaries and music videos.
Why throw everything out there at once?
“Instead of following the appointment-viewing model over a few weeks, we wanted to create this immersive world for the viewer to explore,” MTV New Media exec David Gale told Wired.com by e-mail.
“You can watch the series in its entirety or you can stop anywhere in-between to watch a profile on a band like The Moondoggies, check out a doc about the local burlesque scene, learn more about the Vortex, which is the coolest music studio ever, visit indie music radio station KEXP or just listen to the music. The choices go on and on.”
$5 Cover is accessed through the Coincident TV media player, which sounds like manna from heaven for multitaskers with short attention spans. Viewers can visit a band’s website while watching an episode and simultaneously checking out short films documenting Seattle’s alternative scene.
“We’ve always believed that tech-savvy viewers prefer to access as much content as they can, whenever they can,” Coincident TV CEO David Kaiser told Wired.com in an e-mail.
The series, created in Memphis, Tennessee, last year by Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer and orchestrated in Seattle by indie filmmaker Lynn Shelton (featured in clip embedded below), has not settled on its next locale.
“We don’t know what is in store for Season 3 just yet,” Gale said. “The key is [finding] the perfect filmmakers to capture the music scene in that city.”
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