Jack White waxes nostalgic in bid to reconnect fans to music

"Ray was all about the money and I'm sure he was looking for hits, but he also figured the label was a way of giving back to people who meant so much to him," he says.

Besides small regional acts like British folk singer Laura Marling and the Black Belles, a four-girl garage rock group, Third Man is also releasing a forthcoming album by Wanda Jackson, the rockabilly veteran, and recently issued a live album by Dex Romweber, whose previous band, Flat Duo Jets, White frequently credits as a major influence for his own music.

Mr. Romweber says working at Third Man involved working directly with White. "He seemed to be doing most of it," he says. After releasing a 7-inch single, Romweber later returned to Nashville to bang out a live album that he says was recorded in front of fans he could tell were not familiar with his music.

"I met a lot of people there I never met before. There were probably a lot of White Stripes fans very interested in what [White's] doing now. I got the impression he's infiltrating another audience for our material," he says.

The simple connecting of music fans to musicians is a dynamic that has sharply diminished due to the globalization of the recording industry, which now operates to mainly sell music for commercials, soundtracks, video games, mobile phones, and other entertainment products. Local radio, once the cornerstone for exposing new artists, is burdened by limited playlists. The combined effect has dramatically cut the creative interplay between artists and fans.

"Regional music isn't prevalent anymore. The DJ in Detroit could play a local Detroit band's 45 and it could be a hit only in Detroit. And if it was good enough, it could move on all across the country, or the world.... But it started with a local DJ, a tastemaker," White says. "We don't have tastemakers in our country anymore. It's hard to know who to believe."

White says that because he believes "the two formats that are going to exist in the next decade are vinyl and digital," he refuses to deal with CDs. The Internet, which has suffocated countless small labels due to illegal file sharing, is considered a threat that must be contended with, not fought against. Surprises, such as a secret guest or a special song choice, are no longer worth trying to keep under wraps.

"There's nothing you can do," he says. "Those days are gone."

He says he'd rather "use the Internet for what it's good for and try to make something new out of it." That includes streaming in-store performances live or creating an online fan club that offers special products like multicolored vinyl. The quirks allow him to create quirky hits – a spoken-word recording by the late astronomer Carl Sagan set to a backing beat is the label's top-selling 7-inch single – and give the new generation a chance to have a listening experience that goes beyond hand-held gadgets, the experience through which he says is inherently fleeting. "This week it's something and next week it's something else," he says. "I'd rather have something that's a real experience that could be memorable."

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