I was invited down to the Sound Control event last night at S.O.B’s by a friend (Ariel Hyatt – press tycoon) and saw lots of interesting people from my past. There were several folks I had met while an A&R guy, mostly music managers and record company people. I’m kind of shocked that more of them don’t show up at events like this but I digress…

The panel was called Artists Disruptors and featured Chrisette Michele, Toby Lightman, Rik Cordero and was Moderated by Daniel Weisman from Elitaste. I was most familiar with Toby Lightman as she was signed to Lava just as I was leaving there for Elektra records but it turned out I had seen many of the videos that Cordero had made and as near as I can tell (I can’t hold a camera to save my life) he’s quite talented. The panel started with just Lightman and Cordero being asked questions about what tools they used online and what it was like being a modern artist.

I was better able to hear Toby Lightman – and from her I heard the familiar tale of how being on a major was limiting. She described (accurately from my experiences) the frustration of being tied to promoting only the latest single and not being able to do creative projects out of the scope of the genre that she felt confined to by Atlantic. Since being dropped Lightman has had success with music licensing and even turned around an independent album in three weeks when a last minute offer to be on the home shopping network occurred. She made a point of saying that while tethered to a major she would have never been able to make such a tight deadline.

I understood her feelings completely I had watched the eyes of artists signed to the labels I worked for go from shining with childlike glee to the dull eyes of an animal in a cage that have learned only that it is has no control over it’s destiny. Okay…enough melodrama. Christ, sometimes I make myself sick… The point being there is a lesson in all of this and it isn’t as black and white as major labels suck, be independent (as described we have flogged that dead horse long enough.)

The lesson in my mind is simply “don’t wait.” I watched dozens of artists get signed and undergo the remarkable transformation I began to call the shiny shirt phenomenon. It used to go like this:

1) Band starts making noise locally and / or regionally. Doing great work, directly in touch with the fans, they have self released an album that people are buying, more importantly ticket sales and merch are almost getting these guys to make a living provided they live like college students. They even start getting some support from a local radio station and / or some decent press. The band or artist finally gets the attention of a “real” manager, agent or label…life is good!

2) Band signs with label and appropriately celebrates for several weeks. Best case scenario they pay off their credit cards with the advance and hopefully have enough to put some aside for the proverbial rainy day or better yet they establish a fund for future band projects. Worst case scenario they arrive at their next meeting with their label partners in a new sports car. Artist and label formulate a plan – perhaps re-recording their record, re-writing their bio, helping them find new strategic partners. Publicity department looks over the artist or band and if they are just kind of average looking folks they get new rock n’ roll by numbers haircuts and their flannel button down shirt is replaced by a shiny button down shirt that is a bit too form fitting to make anyone but a CK underwear model feel comfortable.

3) Artist stops doing all of the things that made them a local and / or regional success and stares blankly at label partners with hopeful eyes. Label purchases an opening slot for the band on a huge tour where they are the first of four to go on and they play to significantly less people then they would have on their own regionally. Tour support is spent with reckless abandon lessening the artist’s chance to ever recoup. The single goes to radio and misses.

4) Band is back to where they started having destroyed the momentum they had built with a local album release. They have diminished their local or regional roots by trying to break new markets and neglecting their existing fanbase. Their shows aren’t as well populated as they were before this process and they begin to feel as if there is the stink of major label failure on them or they are “washed up” or “has beens” or “no hit wonders”. Odds were about 50/50 the band breaks up or artist gives up completely and gets a 9-5.

5) Artist tucks old band press photo and new band press photo into a drawer they will rarely open and cover it up with a shiny shirt that never really fit their person or personality.

I am SURE…well…I HOPE it has gotten better than this and labels have adapted but this truly was a common phenomenon as recently as five years ago. If there is an upside to the 360 deal it is that labels are now acquiring bands like major corporations buy smaller corporations and they now have a vested interested in all of the artist’s revenue streams… I somehow doubt they would still make these mistakes again…

The take away from all of this and the lesson, if there is one, is that you never stop remembering that you serve your community of fans and you should never take your eyes of of your goals. The goal for most of us is to make a living doing something we love. Don’t let the sex appeal of the big deal (of any kind) deter you from building your living one fan at a time.

Would love to hear your stories. Email or call.

Rick

P.S. – there was more to SoundCntrl than this…they seem to be an interesting music and technology community building organization.

I just got back home from the New Music Seminar which was held today Tuesday, July 21st at one of the NYU buildings just south of Washington Square Park. The last time I had stood on that spot I was watching Elliot Smith perform at the building that preceded the one I stood in today- at the time it was called the Loeb Student center. It was also at the Loeb student center that I attended my first music conference as a musician trying to get my band signed or be a famous musician or whatever unrealistic albeit wonderful thoughts danced around my marijuana soaked head in those days. I guess it was fifteen years ago, and it was NYU’s “Independent Music Festival” 1994 that I tried to get my band noticed with a cassette of three of songs from my band. I got the only advice that ever really resonated with me as a musician that day, just six words: “play out as much as possible.”

The band broke up, I got an internship at a big record label that became an assistant job and so on until a few years later I became a jaded A&R executive who had spoken dozens on panels and had done my best to answer the same old questions that I had asked when on the other side of the panel.

It was wild to be back in the audience after having been on both sides of the stage and now somewhat removed from the emotional attachment of clearly belonging to either the artist or the executive side. (I still play for kicks and on the other side- I don’t quite consider myself an executive in the same way I did when I was a label guy).

I stayed for the keynote speech by Courtney Holt (President of MySpace Music), a panel called “Welcome to the New Music Business: Everything You Know is wrong” which featured Ian Rogers, Matthieu Drouin, Mark Ghuneim, Bruce Houghton & Jeff Price and a second panel called “Fan relationship management: Quit your day Job” which featured Tom Silverman, Steve Greenberg, Terry McBride, Ted Cohen, Tim Westergren & Emily White.

This is not an insult to the New Music Seminar- I am very glad I went but it’s funny how the company names had changed, most companies were now followed by “.com” or “music” rather than “records” and it is now thankfully much more acceptable to say “I don’t know” rather than slinging some incredible amount of bullshit. It does seem however, as if the music conference is much as it was fifteen years ago. There is a big disconnect between the panels and the audience. In my opinion people who come to panels desperately want very tangible solutions to very real problems about the basics of building their business rather than abstract conversations about the problems of artists who are several rungs higher than they are on the food chain. Granted I missed the “your live show and tour” panel which featured many successful artists who had done it themselves – I’m told it was great. It just never ceases to amaze me how the majority of music business professionals can’t articulate anything about the process by which an artist builds their business on their own so that they are even worth the attention of those same professionals.

I am off and running now but I am going to do my best to provide as much information as I can that worked for me building a local following when I was playing regular shows. Sure, I was armed with cassettes and only got my first email account in 1994 but some of the principals are still the same.

PS – We can all stop flogging the dead and decomposing horse that is the major record label – we get it already.

The group Blue Scholars recently posted the following on their blog:

The old record deal model is dying. Not to say it’s obsolete or not worth it, it’s just that while new alternatives are waiting to be implemented, those traditional opportunities are drying up. Like print publication gigs for journalists. There’s a much larger pool of independent artists with the means to produce music independently. There’s that whole “new media” phenomenon to promote your music. They say the world is at the independent artists’ fingertips, but it’s only half true. Things still cost money to produce–labels might’ve pimped artists, but at least they came out of pocket to back a project financially.

Things change, it happens, we live with it. But changing times demand changing ways of doing things, especially in an economic downturn. Which is why, after ending our partnership with Rawkus last year, we turned down some record deal offers that we might’ve signed in a more quaint and hopeful era.

Today, it gives me great pleasure to announce a collaboration with Duck Down Records and Caffe Vita to release two of our upcoming projects (OOF! EP, August 25 and an untitled full-length album, mid-2010) and re-releasing our last album (originally released through Rawkus), Bayani (Redux).

With the record industry in flux, conditions are ripe for an alternative. One where the artist, rather than becoming an employee of a label or sponsor, contracts the label and sponsors to do work for them. Everybody still gets a check. But it’s a relationship where the artists (and their handpicked “team”) not only have creative freedom but economic power. A counterbalance to Industry Rule #4080.

Honestly, if it were up to me, I’d put out the music for free (and get paid for shows and hopefully, royalties). Or work out a trade for whatever you can me hook up with from your job. That would be ideal if independent artists had more access to the media (we don’t) and more people paid attention to shit not on TV and radio (universal health care would help us out too).

Realities what they are, we–a hip-hop group from the slept-on capital, Seattle–couldn’t let the opportunity to work with Duck Down Records and Caffe Vita pass by. They’ve both retained their independence and thrived on it in a marketplace filled with big business trying to stomp em out. I think they heard us and our audacious plan out because, in essence, they share the same philosophy towards their ventures that we do with our music.

I don’t even like the how word “independent” is used these days but I still fucks with the idea behind the word, which remains relevant from now until the marketplace gets its past-due clean slate. Until then, our best look as independent musicians is to not just support each other, but to support independent entities–whether it be the local mom’s and pop’s store or a family-owned restaurant to independent films and media to grassroots organizations and your kids’ martial arts classes.

Or, we can keep chasing the big record-deal unicorn.

No. Not with all these incredible new tracks laying around and the opportunity to put out records with a record label without signing a record deal. With a label whose music I grew up on and in a changing marketplace ready for new self-sustaining business models. With financial backers who share the same vision of creative and economic independence. They get it, we get it. And everybody (including, most of all: you, the listener) gets a win.

OOF!
Geo/Prometheus Brown
Blue Scholars

——-

I think it’s great that people are trying something new. Bringing in a non music company like Caffe Vita also seems like a good move. If you are going to form a partnership in turbulent times then choosing a company making a living from coffee (and using your project as a loss leader or marketing hook) is probably a better choice than a partnership with a company trying to monetize the sale of music and related properties.

I am most impressed, however, with the way they spun the press release – “Label signs to artist” is great… There have been other artists who have hired managers as employees or contracted labels to provide certain services but those four words tap a nerve that everyone in music circles is feeling right now. The world as we knew it just a few years ago is indeed upside down. If there is a publicist in the mix for those guys who spun their new release plan this way they should hang on to him or her for dear life.

Original post is here:

http://02cd02a.netsolhost.com/blog/2009/07/blue-scholars-duck-down-caffe-vita/ Duck Down

I ran across these photos recently of me, Ahmet Ertegun, Jason Flom, Arif Mardin and a group I signed called the Atomic Fireballs. It was pretty amazing that I was able to work with those three executives on my first signing. These were taken around 1998 by Amy Derouen in Montana Studios in NYC.