I have news: It’s dying. I’m not saying it to freak out you, or to make you run crying to your mom or anything. But you should know. You should know because if you’re one of the ones who’s going to stick around, you’re going to see it happen, and if you want, you can make it easier.

I will tell you when it started, the precise day in fact. It started when This Time Around showed up on the Billboard chart one week after its release. It showed up at number 19. We were too excited to pay any real attention. We were building our webpages and twittering about the new songs and the good reviews. There were new fans, new contests, good reviews, much that boded well. And who cared how many copies Sam Goody and Best Buy were pushing? We’re fans. Numbers are irrelevant. We didn’t notice when it debuted and we didn’t notice when it fell a week later. And fell. And fell. It was gone in a month.

Was that your fault? No ma’am it wasn’t. It wasn’t yours and it wasn’t mine either. I bought it, remember? I bought two. I bought five and gave them out to my friends.

So don’t blame yourself. You didn’t start the ball rolling. The nondescript, untouched unconverted did when they didn’t buy a great album. And frankly, it was, and remains their loss. But that was the first real, bloodletting stab at the "us" in the Hanson equation, the army of writers and poets and artists who decided one day that they would put their time and energy into building a collective, screaming, online tribute to their favorite band.

At one point, we were an army. We owned the internet. We started the phenomenon that is the Band Tribute Page. We invented TRL. Hanson fans. Not Nsync fans or Backstreet Boys fans. We did. We were a big deal, but we self-destructed. Hanson too, probably unknowingly, did their part in helping us get there.

Hanson.net did its part to kill us and kill us dead, oh yes it did. It divided Hanson’s otherwise united online army into two camps, the haves and the have-nots. Hanson.net flew in the face of one of the primary ideological, yet unspoken rules of the internet: You can’t charge me for stuff I can get elsewhere for free. And knowledge is free, baby. Knowledge is free and loving this band, with the exception of albums and concert tickets, is free. You try to put a price tag on that, and you will fail. And if you don’t fail, you’ll at least succeed in pissing off a lot of people. They did. They continue to do so. Fan clubs don’t, and shouldn’t cost a hundred bucks a year. What did Hanson ask of us when they launched Hanson.net? Too much. Who will pay the price? You will if you join, but Hanson will too. They’ll pay the price in that they got in people’s craws when they asked so much in exchange for so little. It was the single thing that turned the online Hanson community into You and Me, and even though we’re loving the same band, we’re sure not loving each other.

That matters. It matters in very big ways, and would matter in even bigger ways in the future, when the This Time Around buzz wore off and we were left in a drought that was dryer than the Sahara. When Hanson goes away, when they retreat into the studio to make their art, the Hanson online community stops being about them and starts being about us. It’s really hard to have an "us," a rallying cry, when all of the Hanson-sanctioned message boards are at Hanson.net, and when there are suddenly two kinds of discourse: The Hanson-approved discourse at Hanson.net, and the sprawling "other" out here.

Then, as if the total fission of our community weren’t enough, Hanson disappeared. Rest assured, this is not a drought. This is not a normal lag between albums. Bands make albums in months, not years. The time between Middle of Nowhere and This Time Around was a drought, sure. But we had a Christmas album, a collection of rarities, and a live album in between. Last time around, whether we remember it or not, it rained every few weeks. This time, something is wrong. Something is deeply, deeply wrong in Hansonland, and no music journalist has cared enough or been curious enough to find out what it is, so we can only speculate: It’s their record company or it’s their management or it’s them, but something is wrong. Don’t think that’s taken a toll on us? Look around you. Websites, popular ones, are dropping like flies.

We live in a sensitive universe as Hanson fans to begin with. Turn away from your computer for a second. This ain’t exactly a popular club to belong to. We used to be able to find some camaraderie and joy in being mutually discounted for our tastes. It was fun. Now, we’re still disenfranchised, but we haven’t even got each other anymore. We’ve got a fragmented, bored community that’s waiting for an album and is too afraid to try anything artistically bold on our own because we’re afraid we can’t cut it without Hanson. And let’s face it, we’re afraid of each other. Go ahead. Say something negative about waiting this long for an album. Express your reservations about the seemingly directionless turn of the new music. See how long it takes for the hate mail to hit your inbox.

See how aware we are of our own fragility? We’re scared to death, and we’re taking it out on each other. We’re scared of losing Hanson, but more importantly, we’re scared of losing us.

Us, trust me, is worth fighting for. Hanson? We don’t need to fight for Hanson. They’ll be there. They’ll be making music or hanging out or doing stuff. Don’t worry. Us is another story. Right now, the state of us is pretty sorry. We might not be able to control anything else. We can’t make the album come out any sooner, and we can’t stop whatever it is that’s gone haywire in Hansonland. But we can take care of, and stop beating up on us.

Support the websites you like. E-mail webmasters. Sign guestbooks And if you’ve got a website that you think you’ve done significant amounts of work on, keep it online. Let the record show that, once upon a time, you cared about something enough to spill thousands of your words over it. Your work is worth investing in, and it will last long after this album has come out.

It will never be the same. It will never be like the early days of this community when there were millions of websites and where the words in everyone’s mouth were positive. That’s a reality. What we can do now is hope that when this new album finally comes out, there will be new sets of ears willing to listen. We can also hope that the old ones will to.