25/11/2008 by ville.

I did something amazing at the weekend. I played a tape. A cassette. It was by Paco de Lucia, the Spanish guitarist. The tape was given to me by my aunt a long long time ago. She used to like to educate me on a lot of artistic stuff. She took me to see The Last Waltz, a documentary on the amazing The Band. She took me to see Stop Making Sense by the equally amazing Talking Heads. She used to work in the movie business. She took my brother Mat to the Moscow Film Festival where he stood next to Robert de Niro at a party.

I’m not a Luddite. New technology is cool and exciting. Tapes… so last weekend I put the damn thing into a tape player and waited for the music to start. Out comes this humongous, undescribable crackling noise, the mother or all hisses. I reached down to turn the whole thing off… at which point I realized it wasn’t tape hiss, it was the audience applauding Mr de Lucia as he walked on stage.

Ahem…

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22/11/2008 by ville.

Policies of hope

We’re all chuffed for the merkin people. The merkins have got a great new prez. All of a sudden merkins are brilliant again. No more dodgy neo-cons. No more war on tourism. It’s the end of an error. New don.

I love it. On some level it’s so cool. Like, sincerely.

With more than half a million dollars spent (equivalent to $9 per achieved vote), the election was a great result in the showbusiness billed as the best democracy that money can buy.

What the hell is a policy of hope?

Artists what do it right 

We spent two of the most enjoyable weeks in the studio, first with Smudge, then with Esteban, recording their next EPs. The current ones have seen the bands on the airwaves, in ink, on-line, on tour, on telly and in form. We expected nothing less. Many thanks to Manilla PR and Daniel Theo PR for the part they played.

As a pleasant side story, we got our first mention in the Financial Times the other day, courtesy of a story they ran on Rosalita. Many thanks to Republic Media for that.

Working with Smudge and Esteban on their next EPs was very rewarding artistically. It’s great to see bands make progress. Great to see that they’re hungry to get better and that they’re doing something about it. The writing is better, the playing is better, the attitude and delivery is better. Not that Mat and I have been slacking either. Our jokes are better and we really have mastered the art of reading Music Week. That’s all producers do, right?

Our newest farm animal, Jamie, has been working flat out in the studio with us, engineering the night away. I’m so feeling the new music we’re making. It’s exciting and I hope to be able to share it with you soon.

Liam, the guitarist in Esteban, got a feature in Total Guitar. Getting featured as a guitar player in a guitar magazine was one of my boyhood dreams. Never one to be twitter and bisted… I’m pleased as a pig in shit for Liam. Besides, I can still widdlediddle faster than he can!  

Smudge got onto Taste Of Chaos. They got the video on MTV2. The were featured in the US rock bible Alternative Press.

Progress BABY!

Speaking of which, check out this nice blog http://neatandpolite.blogspot.com/2008/10/metro-flood.html

It ain’t what you do, it’s how you do…

Last summer I had a meeting with an interesting band from Dorchester. Moontown they’re called. While discussing the local scene, it was no surprise to hear that there wasn’t much of one. That’s not to say that I expected Dorchester to be dead. But it’s the usual whinge of most artists… ;-) 

So, I say: “Why don’t you guys start up your own night and build a scene?” I mean, if there isn’t anything going on, that to me signifies an OPENING. Where else is everyone going to go to? All of a sudden people don’t want to go out, get drunk and get laid? Gimme a break…

A few weeks ago Toby from the band called to give me an update on the preparations for the sessions we’d agreed to do. He told me, very matter of fact, that they’re pulling in the crowds at half a dozen club nights in as many cities. And that it’s spreading! Build it and they will come.

The sessions went just as smoothly. Cool band. Can’t wait to post the stuff here on this blog.

Lefsetz newsletter

Recently I subscribed to a very entertaining newsletter called Lefsetz Letter. It’s been going for 25 years. First as hard copy and now in digital. In it Bob Letsetz, speaks about the music business to, we are lead to believe, an audience of music biz big hitters. It’s educated stuff.

The other day he wrote about the American AOR act Journey whose song Don’t Stop Believin’ is one of the biggest catalogue songs, no doubt because they use it in American Idol so much. I know Journey. I have a cassette of their album Frontiers, copied from a mate when we were kids. Spurred on by Leftsetz I found out about Journey. They had their big commercial success 10 years into their recording career. 10 fucking years! Most careers don’t last a fifth of that. Who in the last 20 years found success after 10 years of releasing records on a major?

I dug deeper. Turns out the band formed in 1973 as a jazz/rock band, mainly instrumental music. Before that they’d played in Santana’s band. So, by the time the 80s rolled along and they made Frontiers, they were a bunch of guys with tons, mountains, universes of musical knowledge, mileage and experience to their name. Shit, their live stuff on YouTube is phenomenal. This is before autotune existed, before any shit shining equipment existed. This had to be played, note for note.

They sure put in their 10,000 hours, which according to experts, is the magic number of work you need to put in if you are to excel in any area. You need to have the talent, certainly, but on top of that you really need to work. The ones who excel not only put in a lot more work than the also rans, but they put much much much more work in that the other lot.

From now on, make the way to your rehearsal space your favourite walkway…!

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14/11/2008 by ville.

Artists who approach us like to assure us of their committment by saying things like: “If given a chance I’d give up the day job. I’ll do anything to make it. If given a chance.”

The moment I told my parents that I was going to London to pursue a career in music must have been horrifying for them.  My dad used to insist I would have made a great lawyer. Why? “Because you can lie your way out of any trouble you’re in.” Thanks…. ;-) 

The decision certainly changed things for the worse in every financial and material sense you could think of. Man, we were so poor we had to steal toilet paper from pubs to have any. We didn’t starve, but we ate very very little. We had no money to spend on recreational items like a can of the cheapest lager.

Ever the upwardly mobile young thing, I decided to improve my lot by getting a gig playing songs in an Italian restaurant. There was this most glorious looking Italian waitress there. Emmanuelle. The name says it all, really. I digress… eventually I got fired for playing the wrong kind of music. I did Nirvana and Oasis covers - the popular stuff of the era. The proprietor wanted romantic Italian songs. The only one I could think of was Shaddup-a-yourface. Didn’t go down well. He sat me down at the end of a busy night, bought me a glass of the best red wine they had and said: “This would be easy if you were bad, but you’re very good. I hate to let you go, but I hope you understand. We’re both men trying to make a living”. It was a touching moment with a Goodfellas-esque script. His meatballs had kept me alive for some time.

All these seasons later, I’ve earned my stripes to speak about what’s involved in creating a livelihood out of music. Some say it’s all about belief. I say, believing in it is one thing, but how ’bout working for it? Ever considered that as an option?

In one of my favourite books by Kurt Vonnegut, the Chinese put a man on the moon through the power of concentrating their minds on it. A cool thought, for sure, but it’s fiction. The guys who actually went to the moon used fuel powered rockets.

All I can say to you, in a band, reading this and thinking that “I’ll do anything to make it, if given a chance” is that the only person who will give you a chance to put music first in your life is you. When you say “I’ll do anything to make it”, you must mean it quite literally, at the expense of everything else.

You just have to decide what’s important to you.

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10/11/2008 by ville.

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05/11/2008 by ville.

Another week, another AIM event. This time the topic was Marketing… On A Shoestring. Given the fact that I walked in with my slip on Vans (black with golden skulls) that don’t even have shoestrings, the tone was set low. Street level, in fact.

The evening kicked off with Mark Mitchell of King Harvest, a marketing consultancy for indie labels, taking us on a general tour of the UK music market. Lots of stats. More than 80% of the market is controlled by majors. We indies are truly living on crumbs… a slightly depressing thought, that.

Mark’s main point seemed to be that there is no point in trying to compete with major labels who can outspend, outrun, and outgrease-a-palm you on all counts. An eyewatering fact: the first week spend on the TV advertising of AC/DC’s new album was £40k. The gentleman sitting to my right, a fellow indie label owner, muttered: that’s more than my annual turnover.

Then the marketing guru pulled out a bell curve chart that showed what kind of people get into music and buy records. Early Adopters at the very beginning of the curve, Pragmatists on the upward slope, Conservatives on the downward slope and Laggards at the very end of the curve. The bit at the top of the curve where pragmatists and conservatives meet is the bit that costs shitloads to reach. That’s your mainstream audience who will buy that big record by that big artist because they’ve seen the big billboards, seen the big TV ads and so on. These are the guys at my squash club. Regular guys with regular tastes: the bulk of the record buying public of 20-39 year olds.

And this is the crowd that indie labels should ignore.

Instead, they should concentrate on the early adopters. These are people who like spotting the new thing to like before everyone else likes it. They respond to a groove that doesn’t cost a lot to create. It’s about being cool and hip and trendy. What’s more, they don’t really respond to marketing messages and advertising anyway, so a poor little indie is onto a winner: they should approach the segment of the public who aren’t going to respond to stuff that costs a lot to create!

The nuts and bolts of how to reach the early adopters were discussed. The usual line up of suspects were introduced. MySpace, Facebook and all the other social networking sites play a big role. Radio does. Print media does. Blogs do. Live performances play a huge part. There is a process. Got to get the specialist guys in on the act first, then move it on. Get the blogs before the front cover of Time. Of course, this is bloody obvious to anyone with a brain, but it helps to be reminded of this stuff, even if you have a decent brain untroubled by excessive substance abuse.

The message was that getting the message out, letting people discover the music is a process that is not to be forced. Just let it out. Let people discover the artist. If it’s good, it will stick. If it’s not sticking, it’s not getting people excited.

It’s like if you’re in a band playing gigs in your home town and with every gig you get less and less people. Something inside you should say “uhh… people aren’t liking what we do… let’s get better.” Instead, the inner voice of many seems to say “dude, we have to get a manager who has contacts to get us on an arena tour supporting a big band.”

The almost comforting piece of information from an indie label point of view was that one’s quest to introduce one’s artistes to audiences is not necessarily a process where having loads of money makes a huge difference - if you remember to concentrate on stuff that’s within you control, within your reach. If it ain’t sticking, it’s pointless spending money because no amount will convince these early adopters that they should like a band.

Ben Watt, who used to be the guy in Everything But The Girl, gave a talk on how he runs his abel Buzzin Fly. The coolest thing he said was that marketing is something you do when you know roughly how much you’re going to sell and to whom, and you’re able to prepare a budget based on that sales projection, and then work out a plan accordingly. He went on to say that most of the artists on the start up indies present at the event aren’t yet in a position to do that. Why? Because they haven’t built their audience yet, so they don’t know who to sell their records to. Guys in that position are just taking a punt on something to see if they can find an audience for their stuff. Good point that.

Summa summarum: believing in something is vastly overrated when you compare it to the power of working towards something. Put that in your book!

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