In five years, the Yonder Mountain String Band has gone from college students to pioneers of a new bluegrass offshoot – jamgrass. The group is enjoying booming attendance nationwide as well as having created their own label – Frog Pad Records – so the band would not have to deal with being managed by corporations.

“It was an idea from the start we wanted to go with from hearing the nightmares bands that we know told us they had with record labels, and also lessons learned on VH1’s ‘Behind the Music,'” said Yonder guitarist Adam Aijala.

The group’s foresight on this issue has kept them from making massive business mistakes.

“You always hear about those people who are like ‘Well, I just signed this thing and now for every record sold I make a penny,’ and I mean you wrote every song on the album, and you basically produced it yourself, and you played the guitar or you played whatever on every track, and you get a penny a record, and that just doesn’t make sense to me,” Aijala said. “It’s exploitation.”

Not being slaves to the industry makes the experience easier.

“I think you feel more connected to your fans, you feel more conscience, your conscience feels better about it; you’re not whoring out to anybody,” Aijala said. “You’re just being yourself and being true to what you do. We’ve never compromised our music for any reason.”

Yonder’s music rides the line between bluegrass and virtually every other genre. The group is influenced by traditional bluegrass picker Earl Scruggs, jazz great John Coltrane and jam pioneers the Grateful Dead.

“We’re different. We don’t have drums but we still play in rock clubs. We’re not pigeonholed to just playing sit-down places like a lot of bluegrass bands are,” Aijala said. “We’re not really a bluegrass band. We are because we have the instruments, but all our influences come from so many different places and all of our influences are channelled through bluegrass instruments, so what you get is an offshoot of bluegrass.”

The traditional bluegrass community has mixed feelings about the Yonder brand.

“Traditional bluegrass fans, the purists, they really like things to be a certain way and I think we’re starting to win more and more of those types of people over because we’re trying to keep that traditional bluegrass ethos alive with regards to playing,” said banjo player Dave Johnston.

Aijala views it differently.

“I think that it’s almost offensive to them for us to be called bluegrass,” Aijala said. “To them we’re not, but I think bluegrass is changing and there will always be people playing traditional bluegrass.

“There’s also other offshoots, kind of what we’re doing which is louder, plugged in. You sacrifice a little bit of the tone of the instrument to get the volume to play the bigger places, and likewise with more volume you can pump out more energy.”

The energy is what brings increasing amounts of fans.

“People come to see us because they leave with smiles on their faces, and I think we make people happy in the stuff that we do. We give it to them with all the energy that we can and likewise it is taken in and bounced back to us,” Aijala said.

Yonder is responsive to not just the crowd’s energy, but also their wishes.

“They’re very interested in wanting to know what the fans want to hear,” said former tour manager and friend Steve Kinefsky. “I’ve been to a lot of different shows by a lot of different artists, and I don’t think you always get what you want; but it seems like at Yonder, they always seem to come through.”

They come through because they love what they do.

“I definitely count my blessings. We consider ourselves extremely lucky and very fortunate,” Aijala said. “It’s something that’ll always keep me grounded to be like ‘you know what, we are so freaking lucky, we’re playing bluegrass for a living.”

The Yonder Mountain String Band will be performing at 8 p.m., Saturday at the Newport. Tickets are $15.