This site is a blog for musicians and music industry people. It is a free educational resource and it is also the way I advertise my music consulting services. I am an entertainment professional with deep roots in the music industry. Throughout my music career I have been a major label A&R representative, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a reality show producer, a bass player and the head of a digital record label.
Patrick Faucher is the CEO and Co-Founder, Nimbit, Inc. by way of being a technologist and life long musician. He is a Berklee College of Music Graduate and one of the founders of direct to fan platform called Nimbit. He was kind enough to take some time and explain to me how Nimbit works and offer some general advice and information on how people are making a living in music using the direct to fan approach.
Tell me a bit about your background and how Nimbit came to be.
PF:
I’ve been a musician my whole life, since age four. I went through high school, and out of high school got a scholarship to engineering school, which was very practical at the time. I studied computer science and electrical engineering back in the early days of the Commodore 64.
I had a VIC-20. I was right there with you.
PF: There you go! I had a VIC-20. I loved that thing. Three years into engineering school, I took a break to go and play music, because that’s always been my passion and my love. I did that for a year and decided the last place I wanted to go was back to engineering school. So, I took some time and applied to music schools and in 1990 I ended up getting a scholarship to Berklee College of Music here in Boston. After graduation I gigged as a professional musician – various groups, from reggae, to blues, to jazz, to world music, to you-name-it. After getting married I realized how unbelievably difficult it was to make a living as an artist and support a family. So I fell back on my technical background and started doing web programming. At the time the web was just starting to be commercialized. I ended up working for a firm called Stumpworld Systems that created some of the very first e-commerce applications for bands including Phish, Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones.
Hmmm. The Rolling…? Oh yea – those guys. Ok.
PF:
We developed an entire suite of e-commerce and storefront tools that powered different sites. We had a bunch of clients – not just musicians. And we ended up building out this whole e-commerce platform. That company rode the boom-bust cycle through the late 90’s into 2001. I was employee number 16 when I got hired as head of development, and two years later we had 180 employees! Six months after that we were closed.
I don’t mean to laugh, but I’ve worked at and seen so many companies like that myself.
PF:
Right. You’ve seen that play. It was a great ride, and we built some great technology. When the dust settled, I got together with Matt Silbert, a Stumpworld colleague. He said, “Hey, I want to get back to serving the musicians we worked with early on and open up a web shop.” I said, “There’s one question that drives me nuts. Why doesn’t every band get online and build a business directly with their fans? There’s no reason they can’t other than the tools are clunky, it’s hard to navigate, and there just isn’t a good platform for it.” That was around 2002 when I started to write the business plan for Nimbit. After that we launched the very first version of Nimbit Web Tools that let you publish and manage a website, run a mailing list, post a calendar, and update your website.
We were developing the storefront piece to go out, and I met up with Phil Antoniades who ran Artist Development Associates. He already had a whole online CD store for artists including a fulfillment solution we needed. We started talking, and he had a whole pile of offline services he was doing for musicians from promotion, to CD replication, to other management type services.
We merged the two companies and created an online artist development platform where artists could put themselves online, get their brand out there, engage their fans, and conduct commerce all in one spot. That was the vision for Nimbit from the get-go: artists need a way to directly engage their fan base, sell direct to them, market to them on an on-going basis, and manage their business. The traditional major label distribution model was rendering itself unnecessary and costly, and we saw then that the market wouldn’t sustain multiple, multi-platinum releases for much longer.
The playing field between “major label” and “indie” was leveling. The lowered barriers to entry certainly meant that a lot more artists could get in the game, and it was a lot more distracting for Joe Fan. But we knew the good artists could easily connect with those fans and start building a business directly with them. And we saw that as the model of the future, so that’s when we set out to build the ultimate platform for direct-to-fan marketing, sales and distribution.
So how long has there been a Nimbit in this current incarnation? How long have you been open with this suite of tools?
PF:
Over five years.
And how many users do you have currently?
PF:
We have over 15,000 artists on our system.
How are you differentiating yourself from the handful of other companies – Topspin, ReverbNation? You’ve been around for a while, but I’m hearing more about you lately.
PF:
Nimbit has been built from the bottom up. From the beginning it was designed to be a fully-integrated direct-to-fan business management platform. We didn’t start out being a widget company a hybrid portal, where it’s fan discovery plus some widgets plus some fan marketing. We didn’t start out to be a CD manufacturer or an online CD store. We didn’t start out to be just high-end merchandising or analytics. That’s part of the reason it’s taken so long for our brand to take hold: it’s a lot easier to sell a single-point solution like a fan widget or an e-mail marketing tool than it is to sell an integrated platform. What’s been our weakness historically is now our strength. We very methodically set out to build everything from the back office, forward. Not only are artists able to publish beautiful storefronts but they’re able to capture all that fan data, analyze it, drill down, create marketing programs for that fan base and then push out those marketing programs that then drive more sales.
We were the first to actually publish a complete digital and physical integrated shopping cart. We’ve been doing this for years, where you can publish CD’s, t-shirts, mp3’s, digital albums, PDF’s – you name it. Any kind of product, digital or physical, you can actually merchandise and market through your store, and the fan doesn’t have to go three different places to get it.
We’ve remained focused on how artists conduct their business behind those storefronts. It’s things like giving them lots of different ways to set up their products, making sure everything is handled from Soundscan, to royalty tracking, to revenue splits with the other stakes holders. It’s complete transparency, so the artist sees where each sale comes from, what channel, etc. Nimbit also gives them conduits to iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody and eMusic as well as publishing their own storefronts, because that’s part of their business as well. It’s things like giving them a central place to work with their customer list and fan list, and to see all their activity data. They can see things like total sales on a per-customer basis.
Our core philosophy from the get-go was to build our solution around the artist such that they could really conduct, build, and operate a successful business. We couldn’t do that by giving them just one part of a solution or one little widget to do e-mail. We couldn’t do that by giving them one little widget to sell an mp3. And we couldn’t do that without giving them things like warehousing and fulfillment and inventory management, which is something you won’t get with others.
Nimbit didn’t do it the easy way. And it was tough to really make the business fly, because you had to coordinate multiple moving parts. It was very expensive to operate, and required a critical mass to sustain it.
Do you have any success stories with somebody using your platform exclusively?
PF:
Absolutely. We see it every day. We have hundreds and hundreds of people really making a living. We have a children’s artist that makes well over six figures per year, using Nimbit to run sales, marketing and distribution.
Another perfect example is an artist named Ellis Paul who’s been a long-time indie staple in the folk and Americana space. He started out with a label and now uses us exclusively. In this past year he raised nearly $100,000 using our platform, directly with his fans to fund his new album.
You have a fundraising aspect as well?
PF:
Yes, it’s actually as simple as creating any other product offer on our system. Ellis set up a bunch of really cool donation bundles, ranging from $50 up to $5,000 and $10,000. People could support him at these different levels, and he did this all through his website, mailing list and at his store. He got a $10,000 offer within half an hour of putting out his first e-mail. He sent this patron down to Nashville where she could sit in for the recording of some of the songs, and she actually played on some of the songs. She said that in retrospect that was the best $10,000 she ever spent. He calls it fan-raising instead of fundraising.
He used that money to produce probably his best album ever to date. And now those same fans that have supported him on the album, he’s activating them and sending concentric rings around them to go out and create buzz about the new album, which he is releasing without a label. But he is already on track to sell more than he’s ever sold in the past. In fact, we have some artists that have, since coming with us after being on a label, sold more and made more money doing it this way than all of their previous releases combined. That’s not an unusual story for us.
How are you integrating with the people on the big social networks?
PF:
Today fans live online; and they live on MySpace and Facebook. We announced a new product which is called MyStore for Facebook. MyStore enables artists to sell individual songs, entire albums, physical CD’s or anything from a Facebook fan page.
The fan doesn’t have to leave Facebook which has a twofold advantage: 1) that’s where the fans want to stay because they’re talking to their friends; 2) because it’s being done there and through Nimbit, so the artist gets a bigger piece of the pie. Because the artists know who bought what, they can say, “Hey, looks like many of our fans enjoy the up-tempo songs. We can send out a note saying, ‘We’ve got this new album featuring these up-tempo songs. And if you want to feature this song on your personal page, you can do that.’”
Essentially there is this whole generation of people – millions who are on Facebook – that live online. The key is that successful artists have been able to find fans where they are. In the past, if somebody played a stadium, the artist didn’t know who was there. The ticket company might know, but the artist didn’t know. We create ways to do that. I think what is especially exciting about the Ellis Paul example is that he raised $100,000 from 300 people. They are essentially his patrons. He compares it to when Mozart went to Emperor Josef. Mozart had one sole patron. So now you can have individual fans who are producers and patrons, and they can be vocal about what they want. This creates a great dialogue. Mass music used to be, somebody had a song and pushes it down someone’s throat and the label makes all the money. In this case, the artist selling music themselves, the fans communicating directly with the artist, it’s a more healthy and fulfilling relationship.
I always compare it to Twelfth Night, because you have the character the fool who would show up for the various different people of royalty and dance and play fiddle for a coin or his supper what have you. It’s become a lot more feudal in that regard.
PF:
That’s a very good point. It has become a lot more feudal, and if you look at the economic model, it mirrors that in a way. It’s coming down into smaller enterprises and more dispersed across these fragmented, niched marketplaces. But you have this very big difference in that you’ve got a communication medium that can cover the entire globe in an instant. It’s not localized from a physical standpoint anymore. So you can have direct patronage across the globe that’s very dispersed, but it follows that similar economic model of the old patronage model.
What about things you’ve seen completely backfire and don’t work or words of caution?
PF:
You have to have both right and left brain. You need somebody who can be a great musician and a great business person. Some musicians might fail as business people because they either don’t have those skills or don’t hire people to do it. You can be the best musician, with the greatest skills and tunes out there, but it’s the power behind the throne. As an artist, you owe it to yourself to understand and be directly involved with the business aspects of your career and understand that you are a business, and you are the CEO of your business. You have to understand what’s going on and surround yourself with smart people. I often point to the fact that back before Madonna was a big star, she was very driven and understood the business of music. When Ray Charles was emerging as a star, he successfully negotiated to retain the rights to masters; he was the first artist ever to do that because he understood the business landscape around him.
I often hear artists say, “You know what? I just want to make the music and get a label to take care of the rest.” And I tell them, “That’s a recipe for disaster. Not that that couldn’t work out, but your approach is a recipe for disaster. You will quickly get taken advantage of and spit out and not end up where you want to be.”
There’s an interesting story that is indicative of how mindsets are changing in terms of how artists define success. For the past three or four years I have given a lecture at Berklee College of Music. It’s generally a talk about distribution and marketing and different concepts for getting your music out to market. I ask at every workshop I do, “How many of you want to go make a living in music after you leave Berklee?” All of them raise their hands. “How many of you see working with a label or getting a label deal as critical to doing that and making a living?”
Four years ago every person in the class raised hands. Two years ago, only half the students raised their hands. This year, I went and gave a similar workshop and asked the same question about a month and a half ago, and exactly zero people raised their hand.
None of them saw a major label as a critical component for success. I thought that was fascinating.
Jill Sobule
For those that don’t know Jill Sobule is a gifted singer-songwriter who is probably best known for her 1995 Singles “I kissed a girl” and “Supermodel”. Jill has released seven albums full length albums and several EPs and has released records on MCA, Atlantic, Beyond and Artemis records. Jill’s most recent album was a self release that was funded entirely by her fans. I met Jill when working at Atlantic and she remains the kind and gracious person I remember from almost fifteen years ago. She was kind enough to give me some of her time by phone before the Thanksgiving Holiday.
I know a lot of people know your name, but even though we worked together, I don’t know the earlier parts of your story or about what you initially did to build a following and first get picked up at MCA.
JS:
In those days, before there was social networking, how did you get followings? I suppose, I played shows a lot; and I remember I had a bit of a following in Denver, and then I moved to New York, and then I met someone who was a publisher out of Nashville, and he saw me at my last show in Denver before I moved to New York. He was interested in non-country acts, and he put me up at the Nashville Extravaganza. It was like the South by Southwest of Nashville. The A&R people from New York and the west coast came to Nashville, and they saw me and signed me. At first they thought it was very cool that I was this pop act from Nashville, so I let them think I was from Nashville for a while. That was the days of getting discovered. That’s how I got on MCA, though a little bit before that I was in New York. Remember those pre-YouTube Days? What you did was you played and played out. I think maybe people are coming back to this too, I hope.
You did the MCA thing for a while and had some decent success with “I Kissed a Girl” and with “Super Model” during the Atlantic years. Tell me about life after major labels.
JS:
After the album that had “I Kissed a Girl,” I did another one – “Happy Town” – and it was always my reaction to do something different and weird. I don’t think the label knew what to do with me after “I Kissed a Girl,” because, was I a novelty act? What was I? There was nothing else like “I Kissed a Girl.” It was one of those songs that was added last minute as a goofball song. I didn’t know that would be a single. It was kind of my curse and my blessing. I think when the second record happened, they still didn’t know what to do, and I was dropped. Then I was on a record label called Beyond Records, and that was another one of those where it went belly up. Then I joined Artemis with Danny Goldberg for the album after that.
I had no idea you were with so many labels subsequently.
JS:
Oh yeah. And then Danny Goldberg signed me and then went to Air America afterwards, and he was my guy. So nothing really happened after that. And then they went under. My last two before this one were on indie labels that went under. It’s not very good luck, I must say.
I wish that were an exceptional story, but it does seem to be the rule rather than the exception now.
JS:
I don’t feel special. The only thing I would like is to have all those records back. That’s my only disappointment – my only one that carries on now. There are a few of them I’d like to have back. I’d bootleg them now anyway.
After Artemis, what happened then?
JS:
After Artemis, I thought, “Enough,” for a while, and I was just playing around and gather songs, creating songs. I had a three-year gig doing music for a show for Nickelodeon called “Unfabulous.” It was the first and last time I’ve ever had a job. I scored the show for three years. It was a live action with Emma Roberts, and it was really fun. I learned so much. I remember when I was trying to get the gig – it was a friend who was creating it, and I think she knew I was lying – and I said, “Oh yes, I’ve done this before,” even though I’d never showed her my resume that had nothing on it. And it was one of those things where I said, “Okay, here’s the first show, and I have 50 cues I have to make. What do I do?” At first you’re bullshitting, and then you realize, “No, I’m doing it!” It was really kind of great. I did that, and it takes up a whole lot of time. Since I’m not savvy at the computers and my Pro Tools, I had another friend – one in New York and one in L.A. – work with me on it, because I was always between the two towns. Then, I thought, “I’ve got this collection of songs.” Throughout this all, my following was growing, even before there was Facebook. I had newsgroups, and I was really, really good at communicating with fans. I had a really good relationship.
About six months before I did this jillsnextrecord.com, I said, “Hey, what would you guys think? There’s no point in going to another label. What’s the point, and why would they have me?” I said, “Would you guys contribute to my next record?” And it was overwhelmingly great response. In the meantime, I kept playing a lot. I played in New York a lot. And I do this thing called “The Jill and Julia Show.” I do this thing with Julia Sweeney from Saturday Night Live, and we’re still doing it. She tells a story and I sing. In the meantime, I’ve been completely active and actually touring a lot. In a way, it’s like Old Time and New Time. On one hand, you build a fan base online and on the other hand, you work Old Time and hit the road. I actually came up with an idea – jillsnextrecord.com – where fans, at first just my fans on my newsletter would help me make a record. And I didn’t want them to just give me money, so I developed different levels of contribution in return for different gifts and services. For $25, you get the first CD before it’s released. I didn’t know how I was going to release it, but … everything from free concert tickets, to “I’m going to put you in the thank you’s,” to “In my last song I’m going to mention your name,” to house concerts, to weapons-grade plutonium. The weapons-grade plutonium was a total joke; for $10,000, a person could sing on my record. Someone actually did it. It was so much fun, and the great thing and scary thing about it was, I thought, “This could’ve just been my mother and a few fans.”
Were you hopeful this would really get funded? That’s such a leap of faith in so many ways.
JS:
I tried to figure out how much it would cost to record the record, and I tried to figure out, “What do labels do?” I figured out how much it would cost to market it, hire a publicist, tour. I put together some arbitrary number that seemed like even for a label that would be an indie would be a budget. And if I would’ve gotten $10,000 that would’ve been fine, I would’ve done that too. I ended up in less than two months getting that, and I had to stop it, because people kept putting more in.
Wow. It’s just so flattering.
JS:
I know, it’s crazy. And a lot of that was just presales too.
You’re an artist that’s been around the block – on the majors and the indies, doing it yourself. What did you do to put out this record? My understanding is it’s done pretty well.
JS:
Well, I don’t know how well it’s done. I don’t know who buys records. I sell a lot of them online and at the shows. What I did was I had a manager at the time when I first did it, who I knew was so wrong. He was a nice guy, but he was so wrong. I remember he came to the studio when I recorded it, and we were finally at the end. He said, “This is great. I can’t wait to have a CD. Burn me a CD so we can start shopping this.” And I said, “No! People would kill me.” So I found someone that felt the same way I did, even though I don’t think even he knew how much work and what a pain in the ass it was. I just hired someone for distribution and a publicist. There were a few items where I probably wasted money; like people working with “new media.” “We’re going to help with your brand.” What is that?
It can be very vague unless you get someone to detail a plan for you.
JS:
Exactly. I think I had some losers. That’s what I did. It seems like the last thing I had were some stores, and you can get it – like Barnes and Noble. Who knows if the next time it will ever be hard copies. I think the only reason to have hard copies is that it shows; people can have a souvenir.
How have you found the touring changing in the last few years? Have you found the kind of access fans have and the reach you have with fans has changed that for you?
JS:
Well, I’m not at the level where my tickets are really expensive, and because of the economy they can’t come to my shows.
I guess I mean reaching out before you get to a region.
JS:
Oh yeah, well, that’s fantastic. Today on my Facebook, I say, “Going to Denver. Who wants my extra drink tickets? Who wants a backstage pass?” I’m still at a level where it can be pretty personal. And maybe someday it will grow so fast, but right now it’s at a place that suits me. There are certain artists that want to have a wall between them and their audience. But I like feeling like I’m just in someone’s living room.
That’s really nice.
JS:
It takes up a lot of time though. I spent a lot of time on the internet. I went over my 5,000 friend limit on Facebook.
I know, I got an e-mail about that. I was mortally offended. (joking)
JS:
I know, I feel so bad. What can I do? I wish I could just have one. It’s a pain in the ass, because I have my Twitter, my Facebook, my Facebook musician page and my Website. I haven’t looked at Myspace in ages.
There are just too many places to be present online now.
JS:
That’s the hard thing. I’m constantly learning right now. I feel like after I get back from tour, it’s back to the chalk board. I have to figure out what my next adventure will be and how to do it.
Are you going to be doing another record?
JS: I have this idea that in the meantime I’m going to do a bunch of little EP’s and put them on my web page – songs that are special event songs, like a Valentine’s song. I’m thinking about the most depressing Valentine’s song, or just really sad songs. I’m going to have themes for my EP’s.
Do you have any advice – things that have been really effective for you in terms of online activity and maybe any words of caution for artists?
JS: I have a couple things. The pluses and minuses – like you said – if people want to be my friends on Facebook, for example I spent a lot of time emailing them back, trying to be as personal as I can, saying, “Hey, join my musician page, because this is over the friend limit.” But it takes up a lot of time. I feel like with each one, whether it’s true or not, you’re building up a new fan. And that’s really good because they’re the Man now instead of the label, but it takes up a lot of time when you could be writing songs. On one hand, I really missed having a label doing all this stuff for me. I haven’t written a song in a long time, and I’m ready. I would say – I won’t completely bash the label thing. First of all, it gave me money to record a record that never sold anything and I’ll never recoup, but I didn’t owe anything. With this record, there were extra expenses. I didn’t know it was going to cost this. There are wonderful things and downsides to it too.
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Check out more about Jill Sobule
I get roughly 4-5 show invites per day. Come see my band play, come see me spin- stick around for our friend’s band. It’s funny too because realistically I don’t actively socialize with a large group of people, nor do I go out as regularly as I did as a younger man so if I’m getting 4-5 invites per day I can only imagine what it is like for people who are a much better target as a potential audience member.
I must admit I delete a fair amount of FaceBook event invites and E-vites and emails after only skimming them. It is very rare that I get an email that stands out- I’m over-saturated as I’m sure most people are in this day and age.
I recently got an email that was forwarded to me by a friend of mine and had I not had any plans to be elsewhere that evening I would have showed up and that is very rare for me especially when the event is featuring an artist or DJ I am not familiar with…
He wrote:
Friends etc.,
An untimely grease fire at the workplace has left me temporarily unemployed. You can imagine all the snivelling phone calls I’ve been making to everyone I know who might have the power to get me any kind of paying Disc Jockey gig. One such call has resulted in my return, tomorrow (Friday) evening, to the venue where the string of disappointments that is my New York City DJ “career” was launched, way back in the roaring nineties.
Come by after work, if any of you still have a job. I will be there playing rock & roll records, if I can figure out how to undo whatever the DJ from the night before did to all the plugs in order to hook up his or her computer software. Alcoholic beverages will be served, gently separating you from your money. As a bonus, the anthropologically inclined among you will get a rare opportunity to make field observations of our modern craven capitalist society at its absolute worst: Ludlow Street on a Friday night, 2009.
Come support me as I make every effort to befuddle the kids who will be running the world when we are old and helpless!
Motor City Bar, 127 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, Friday December 4th from 7 to 11 PM…
The gravy on top of the sundae: When I am done, Messrs Larry and Suke of Born Loose/Candysnatchers take over on the turntables. It could end up being the most Three Stooges-esque DJ changeover in history.
Thank You,
Matt
Call me crazy – I figured that the event would be a good time because I got the sense that the author who I have never met (save to ask his permission to re-post his invite) would be having a good time. I am not suggesting anyone copy the style of this letter but rather be made aware that personality can still get through to people even in an email. I was also inspired by the fact that sometimes reality is the best pitch there is…
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More soon,
R
I thought it would be interesting to highlight the accomplishments of some of the folks who are out there hustling. As you all know there are so many musicians out there. How does one distinguish oneself from the masses of aspiring artists out there especially without having a great deal of disposable income? Below are three examples from regular (albeit talented) musicians I think are doing things a bit differently and I believe it will pay off.
1) Victor Rice.
Victor Rice was the bass player for the Scofflaws and the NYC Ska Jazz Ensemble. I was fortunate enough to study bass with victor many years ago. Victor moved to Brazil several years ago and he has since honed his producing and mixing skills in the last few years. I don’t know this because I have seen Victor or kept up with him (I’ve been a lousy friend) but he has been doing some video of him doing live Dub Mixes under the name Strikkly Vikkly. In the digital age people take the skill involved in making and mixing records for granted. I say if you’ve got the skill – show people… Is Victor good at mixing? See for yourself:
2) This is a ShakeDown
I saw this band at the Dewey Beach Music festival and they were quite good live. What made a lasting impression on me though was when I came across the video below and heard how it was made. I caught up with Brandon, the lead singer of the Cleveland based group and he explained to me that the band actually borrowed 21 MacBooks and used the program photobooth (pre-installed mac software) and captured five or six takes of the band performing their song “Circles”. The video was shot in their rehearsal space and the editing was done by someone at their label (an independent called Reversed Image Unlimited. Total cost to the band – 0$. Check it out:
Pittsburgh, PA based Good Night, States emailed me kind of out of the blue. I try to listen to everything people send me and usually that means 1-2 songs. An hour after having their music playing in the background I realized that I was really enjoying what I was hearing which sadly rarely happens these days. I had the pleasure of seeing them live at CMJ and really enjoyed the show as well. I have yet to see this device live in action but apparently the band developed and Iphone application that allows fans to plug in their Iphone to the sound system and play along with the band live. Pretty trippy.
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More posts coming soon. Thanks as always for reading.
-R-
I am sitting at the edge of the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon trying to fill it in. That’s what marketing and self-promotion can feel like in the digital age or at least, that’s the way it feels to me.
I walked into a cavernous Barnes and Noble last night. They just opened another location by me on East 86th street in New York. I can’t begin to describe how big it is. I’ve lived in Manhattan my entire adult life so I do a double take when I see wasted space- but this? This place is ridiculous. It completely freaked me out. I felt a primal fear that I haven’t felt since Sylvia Rhone (former CEO of Elektra) used to scream at me but that’s a whole other blog post. I’ve spent considerably more time than I originally thought I would writing and creating content for this website and to realize that this one store contained a million or more books and these were just the books that were deemed the best by major publishers meaning the total volume of writing out there is… staggering.
What could I possibly have to offer that wasn’t already written somewhere?
It made me think about the quality of what I write and the quality of my coaching. You really have to be exceptional to make it these days. It reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend Mark Hermann recently about “just because you can – should you?”
We were talking about music and how there were no more barriers to entry and how on the one hand – what a wonderful freedom! On the other hand – how can we hear any one thing if we are in a stadium full of people screaming and demanding to be heard? Would we know if one of these voices was the next Beatles? Probably not. I love that image and wish I could claim it as my own but it belongs to Mark and I think he’s right on. One of the larger music management companies in New York has a sign on the door that reads “It’s about the music, stupid.” I think we are very quick to forget that these days.
I have been consulting and coaching artists informally for years but have only really begun Musician Coaching as a business in the last month which is when this site went live. I help people make sure they are in all of the right places online and to make sure that their website accomplishes what it needs to accomplish. I help people by providing a critique of their audio and video materials and their marketing efforts, their live show and the way they approach the people who sit behind one of the many desks where dreams go to die that stand between them and opportunity.
Sometimes I need to spend more time telling people to continue to develop their product and how best to do that because it can be worth the wait. The Beatles wrote a hundred songs before you ever heard note one of their first record and had played covers for several years. R.E.M played pizza joints in Athens Georgia in complete obscurity for a long time. Peter Frampton toured non-stop for three years before recording Frampton comes alive.
I can wake up tomorrow, write and record a song and have it up on MySpace tomorrow but should I? I’m not saying there is anything wrong with doing so but I do think if you are just starting out you should have realistic expectations of your abilities and the level at which you expect people to respond.
Why doesn’t anyone care anymore? It is simply because there is too much mediocrity out there. I say this often “There is no one in the audience because everyone is on the stage.” Cheap recording gear and low or no cost international distribution are now tools that are in everyone’s hands. The music business is no longer an exclusive club – if you’ve got an Internet connection and a mic in jack you can now be considered a member.
“It’s about the music, stupid.” It’s a great reminder. All I am suggesting is write 100 songs and put the best one of those 100 out for people to hear. I am suggesting that if you have to cut your teeth playing live and are struggling making it solo- try to do it as a sideman or a hired gun. 99% of the “overnight success” stories you hear involve someone working their ass off behind the scenes for a long long time before they broke. If you want a good read- check out the Hendrix book “Room Full of mirrors” – Jimmy played 2nd fiddle to a ton of people before going out on his own.
In America there seems to be this feeling that everyone gets their 15 minutes or worse yet- everyone deserves their 15 minutes. We have been sold this vision that at any moment fame and wealth may strike without working for it. There is something tattooed on the back of our brains that somewhere out there Ed McMahon is looking for each and every one of us with an over-sized check and that the rest of our lives will be taken care of from that moment on… I’m all for the Lotto slogan “Hey, you never know” but I’m sure as hell not depending on it.
What is my point? My point is, and I don’t exclude myself, we have to spend less time on marketing and more time making sure we have products that are worth marketing. There is more music out there than ever before- everyone you know is a “musician” or at least a hobbyist and consumers are very jaded. Before shotgunning your product out there and whipping your fans into a frenzy about your new release you had better make damn sure that you have a product that is not only competitive but stronger than most of the stuff you see and hear or it’s over before it starts.
Below are some examples that were sent to major label A&R people recently. How much time and effort would have been saved if these people got feedback from anyone, even their friends and family before putting this out into the world? These are extreme examples but if you wonder why music business people are jaded…take a listen.
