It's always interesting to gauge a musician's take on how the net has impacted music, and what they do with it personally. To state the obvious: a blue-chip band, like U2 or Metallica, will see their record sales negatively affected by downloaders all over the world.

Then, I have to consider someone like Brooklyn native Dan Ingala, who has just recently birthed NYC electro-pop band Plushgun. After only a brief stop in Canada for Canadian Music Week the trio (drums and a guitarist will join Dan and his synth-keyboard setup) is taking off to Spain, even before touring their own country.

Dan, who took a break from the video shoot to speak with me, was in the process of explaining their rise to popularity and whether he thought someone needed to be technologically savvy to get quality recordings online for others to hear.

"I wouldn't say I'm savvy. I play a lot of video games and I guess that really helped me get through a lot of technological trial and error. So, I taught myself a lot of things. But I don't understand 90% of the programs, I just know what I need to do and I know want I want to do, so I'll just figure it out when it needs to be done. As far as Mac computers go, I do consider myself above the bell curve, but I am not a wiz-kid."

Dan is definitely a gamer. We discussed how unfortunate it was that music was taking away from his ability to really "get inside a world", but it seems that Nintendo Wii is filling that void for him. He recommends Wii Tennis, and Mario Strikers.

What really started Plushgun on their trek to Canada and Spain, was when Dan first put the super-catchy single, Just Impolite, online . From there, an online show called We Need Girlfriends picked up the track and used it in their series, which generated a lot of buzz for Dan. He had no choice but to put together a band and and produce a full-length album, Pins and Panzers. It was just released in Canada on March 10th.

"I think that the internet has made music much more democratic. If something's good, people will listen to it, and if it sucks, no one will. There was just so much opportunity for people to find [Just Impolite], and that created a snowball effect. The internet is what got us to where we are, but it has its problems. You have some people that have no talent and just fit the image, but the good part is that I would be hurt and people that I would have never have heard of would be hurt if this was the music industry of the mid-nineties."

Summed up...

"I would be nowhere."

So we circle back to the question of why the jump was to Spain. I understand that they want to go there (I want to go there too), but how is that a more viable or immediate option than, say, a neighbouring state?

"There is a dj there that picked up our track [Just Impolite] and people just loved it and also Spain has more of a dance culture than the U.S. does - for sure. So there are a bunch of promoters that really want us to go there. Our music is pretty dancy."

It is bloody contagious, is what it is.

Plushgun will be playing March 12th and 13th at Wrongbar.