Radiohead v. Van Halen

12/04/2008 by ville.

Live music

It’s alive and well. Business is booming. How can emerging artists participate in the gold rush? How do you get your act on the road? How do you promote your own night? When and where and how do you get an agent? Those themes were discussed at am AIM www.musicindie.com sponsored event at MCPS-PRS headquarters in London. Yours truly went along to meet and greet.

The panelists included agents, promoters, people running labels, artists, more promoters and Feargal Sharkey. The guy who sang Teenage Kicks and A Good Heart These Days Is Hard To Find. These days he is the main guy at British Music Rights www.bmr.org , an umbrella organisation for publishers and songwriters, where he works hard to lobby for the music business. Remembering his punk rock roots, he launched into his opening statement, his keynote, by venturing out into the middle of the seated audience, leaving the safe confines of the podium behind him. Problem was that the wireless mic he had pinned to his collar didn’t work. Not a great start to an event on the live business…

A good mic these days is hard to find… However, a good idea worth finding is this: it should be made mandatory for everyone in a band to watch videos of these events. I understand why people at labels (AIM, the sponsor of this event, is the umbrella organisation for independent labels) would want to find out about this stuff, but let’s face it, if you’re running a label and haven’t already figured out most of what was said on the night, where have you been all your life?

But every new artist on the planet should hear it like it is. Hearing stuff from other people’s perspectives is educational, motivational and, hopefully, if you make the right conclusions, gets you to spend your time and energy on the right things.

So, how do you build a touring business? It would appear that you have to start small and locally. Build a buzz in your home town. Put on your own nights. Build a presence. Find your fans. Then take it to towns near you. Play with bands whose audiences are likely to dig your stuff. Do gig swaps. Build. Find. Promote. At every gig make sure that every person in the room knows who you are.

Now that last point is very important.

Just the other night I went to a gig and liked what I saw, but the band had no banner, no flyers, no nothing by which I could identify them. The singer mumbled something incoherent about dubyadubyadubyamicepaceforwardslashfghhrteyy.

Not only do I, the punter, have to know who you are, but at the end of the night you must have my contact details so that you can tell me when you’ll be back. Which means you have to engage with the crowd after the gig as well as during it. Thank the promoter, too. You know, it’s called social networking. “Social” as in “meet people”, “networking” as in “find out about them”.

As you see, you can do that stuff outside the hallow turf of myspace.

When I started touring in the mid 90s, there was no micepace, no internet at such to help spread the word to potential fans, find venues etc. I just phoned up a bunch of venues, dug out the names of the promoters, sent out CDs, hassled them until I had a tour in place. Then the three of us packed the entire drum kit, a guitar amp, bass head, our guitars and basses and our good selves into the drummer’s Ford Escort and drove off. We slept on people’s floors and ate whatever was offered. Didn’t make any money on the first couple of tours, but didn’t lose any either.

After about a year and a half of that we got pretty good and started attracting people whose livelihoods were in the music business. And then we took it to another level, making our livelihoods that of playing in a rock band.

Now bands have a lot more tools at their disposal to get the word out to fans and to ferret gigs. But in a time when everyone is in a band, there is a lot more competition. It’s probably not any easier. Probably not any harder either. Just different. Under no circumstance should you send out large blanket emails to every promoter in the book. Study their nights and approach them as individuals. The trick is to have something better and more unique to sell. Better recordings, cooler photos, a more interesting story with an angle. More activity on MySpace. And why try desperately to get gigs at the hippest club in town? To be seen by A&R guys…? Forget them. Right now they’re not interested in you and you shouldn’t be interested in them. Put on your own shows. Get a temporary license and do one at the bus stop if that’s where you can get an audience. Most of all, be more creative and active than the other fellow. Have a strategy. Sustain it. Be patient.

And little by little you will find that, if you’re good, you will start getting the better and bigger gigs you want. The gigs themselves don’t change - it’s the audience coming to see you that changes and makes the gigs better and bigger. But if all you’ve done is a handful of sparsely attended shows in your home town (with attendance declining because your mates are getting tired of seeing you), don’t expect agents/managers/promoters/labels to be that bothered.

Consider the promoter. His livelihood depends on selling tickets. If your band doesn’t pull a crowd, he can’t run his business. He can’t make people come see your band no matter how much promotion he does if people don’t know who you are. Some big promoter from up north opened his lecture with “I try not to book bands from out of town because they’re not worth bodies through the door”. Sobering. Agents by and large were saying that bands and their managers approach agents way too early. I realised I’ve been guilty of that. The best way a developing band can get gigs is for someone in or close to the band with the gift of the gab to act as the booker. The idea is to get as many shows as possible so that you get great and you make lots of fans who also think you’re great. Then, in time, an agent, whose job is not to get you as many gigs as possible, but to develop your touring business over the long term, has something on which to build.

If you, dear reader, have the gift of the gab and want to be a booker, get in touch. ville@theanimalfarm.co.uk 

I like events like this AIM event. Much of the stuff was familiar to me because of my touring background, but it’s always great to just… be reminded of how things work in real life as opposed to the mythical land of rockstardom that we all love to believe in. If we just believe enough, it will happen. Hmmm….

It’s also sobering to see just how many labels with just how many artists there are out there. Competititon is, if not qualitatively great, quantitively absolutely mind-boggling. Of course, all the other labels think that our artists suck, just as much as I think theirs are duff. And I have yet to meet a band who doesn’t think they’re better than everyone else. But not everyone can be better than everyone.

Tony Moore of the Bedford http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bedford spoke about the business of being in a band very well, I thought. (When we moved to the UK years ago, our home studio was still in transit, so we cut some demos in Tony’s home studio while he and his girlfriend, who wrote a massive song for Celine Dion or someone like that, went out for a coffee. Bloody hell, it’s not a big business this music business, is it? We shared management with Tony back then.)  He said that if you look at your band like a start up company, you should get a budget together, allow time to do some R&D (research and development), get the product right, start marketing that product and so on. You should expect to make a loss for the first year or two. Then break even. Profit will come later down the line.

That, to me, is far better way of looking at it than the mythical one: band spends £250 in a dodgy studio, recording and mixing 6 songs in a day, plays a handful of gigs, thinks it’s time to get a “manager with contacts to move them up to the next level” , sends a blanket email to every label and manager in the Unsigned Guide www.theunsignedguide.com gets frustrated when no one gets back to them. Or better still, gets offended when someone says that their project needs further development.

On that last point, a memory from more than a decade ago. We played a gig at the Dublin Castle. Had a manager in attendance. He’d liked our demo and came to see us live. Didn’t like the live show at all. When I approached him after the gig, he said as much in no uncertain terms. I took it personally and rubbished the manager’s other band and told him he was a wanker for taking them on, just because I was so pissed off with his reaction to our gig. The gig, by the way, was reviewed in Metal Hammer and they said we were great…. In retrospect, I know now that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the press.

And if there is anyone out there thinking “I’m an artiste, all I wanna do is create and play, I don’t wanna handle business”, take a page out of Bob Dylan’s book Chronicles in which he describes his early years on the New York folk circuit. He sussed out that he had to find a unique selling point to make it. Most other singer/songwriters were singing their earnest songs in a really nice way and talking to the audience in soft hushed tones. Bob did the opposite: he developed his harsh nasal singing style, ploughed through the set at a fast pace and barely acknowledged the crowd. Half the peeps didn’t like it, but the half that did became a loyal fan base. In those days you wouldn’t get paid for singing in a coffee shop. Artists passed the hat around. So Bob hired this great looking girl with big tits to pass the hat around. Even if he shared the income with the voluptuous siren, the remaining half was still more than he would have made on his own. Talk about enterprising rock’n'roll business, baby!

XFM meets AIM

AIM also organised a meet and greet with XFM. It was about how indies can get their music on the radio. Not very easily, it would seem. Music is king, but money talks and bullshit walks. Gotta have great records and a lot of interesting stuff happening. I learned a new phrase. Psychographics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychographic They are kind of like demographics, which is the way marketing men lump us into groups of consumers according to our age and spending power, but psychographics is more about our values and thought processes. People in different walks of life, in different phases of their lives, may still have many things in common. And the (m)ad men at radio stations are keen to exploit these by programming just the right kind of aural pleasantry for your daily journey from your home to your place of gainful employment in this great economic system of ours.

On the subject of how to get songs on the radio, the best question came from some bonehead who asked whether or not recording quality mattered. Or if mastering was a good idea. And if the length of the song was an issue. Sometimes I wonder.

Radiohead v. Van Halen

Those who know us know that there are three rules at The Animal Farm: no slapping on bass, no Radiohead, no dissing Van Halen.

Our policy is strict for good reason: Slapping is terrible. Radiohead suck. Van Halen rule. (Van Halen is understood be early, classic Van Halen from 1978-1984)

I’ve never been a Radiohead fan, but the other week, working with the very cool Southampton band Soma High www.myspace.com/somahigh , I asked their singer Sean to do a mix CD of his favourite band, Radiohead, for me. You see, I’m willing to be persuaded. After years of not getting Led Zeppelin, I bought a boxed set for that precise purpose. Still didn’t get the Zep, but at least I tried.

Listening to Radiohead in depth has made me change my view on the band. I no longer think that listening to Radiohead makes one want to kill oneself. No, for that to happen the music would need to have a spark, something that makes one want to take action. Someone still needs to say: “Go ahead, JUMP!”

…. I get UP! And nothing gets me down.

Thanks for reading.

V.

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