I thought most people familiar with Ryan and Macklemore's story knew about this already. It's not entirely a secret they hired help from Warner (through ADA) to

I thought most people familiar with Ryan and Macklemore's story knew about this already. It's not entirely a secret they hired help from Warner (through ADA) to do promotion, they've been pretty open about it. The interesting and impressive aspect about the story of Ryan Lewis and Macklemore is that they were the ones hiring the label, not the label hiring and exploiting the artist like is usually the case. What these two guys did was get a song to number one all without losing one single bit of creative control. The labels didn't tell them what their album should sound like, who it should be marketed too or what the first single should be, the label merely used their resources to get the song on the radio and the rest happened organically. Thrift Shop was one hell of a catchy song, they deserve every bit of success they have. It was in the best interests of the label and Ryan and Macklemore to get the song out there. The song was rising up the iTunes charts and Youtube so fast before it hit the radio that the radio had no choice but to play it anyway. The reality of music is you can't rely solely on digital music sales, physical mediums are still well and truly alive (on the decline but still alive and kicking). If you want to physically distribute music, labels which have been in the business for a long time like Warner Bro's have established supply chains that can get music manufactured and distributed faster than an independent artist manually burning CD's, printing, putting them in jewel cases and mailing them out ever could. What do people expect? Did you expect Ryan Lewis and Macklemore to build their own manufacturing plant, purchase expensive printing and duplication equipment, hire employees to package their music up and then establish trade distribution agreements to get their music out there? I hate to sound cynical, but this is shoddy journalism. It's like saying a company producing ground breaking medical equipment couldn't have succeeded without the help of Microsoft or Intel because the computers they used to document their research notes and build their CAD drawings on were Intel computers running Windows 7... The journalistic standard of NPR is usually pretty good, but this article definitely subtracts a couple of points of respect that I had for them. Don't get me started on that link-bait title, "The Real Story Of How Macklemore Got 'Thrift Shop' To No. 1" — you can't say that's not a completely misleading title that insinuates that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis have been lying about some all aspects of their career. The general gist of this comment is: they outsourced the promotion of their music to a label rather than being owned by the label. No secret, just intelligent. Definitely not a secret, read around, they've made this known. Recently on Colbert they essentially said just that as well. What's the issue here?