BREAKING: Best Buy to Squeeze Out New Artists & Indie Labels
Word on the street is that Best Buy has handed down a new set of policies to music distributors regarding new release orders that will effectively cut-off the entry of new artists and independent label releases into their stores. Reasons given include Best Buy’s belief that they are not getting “equal return” on initial orders, resulting from what they call “inflated forecasts.”
So what does this mean?
Those most affected will likely be new artists, particularly those on independent labels that cannot support forecasts that meet Best Buy’s new desired first-week sales threshold. With indie music shops almost completely wiped-out by big-box retailers over the last few years, this leaves very few retail outlets for literally hundreds of indie labels and thousands of releases each year. One could also speculate that this will only help expedite the transition from physical to digital music purchases. We will continue to report on this story as it develops…
10.8.09Champagne Superhova: Q&A with BigChampagne’s Eric Garland
In our most enlightening Q&A to date, BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland shares his insight on the issues facing the music and technology business in the last 10 years. It’s a must read for industry insiders in the online and offline world. He recently stopped by RM 64 headquarters to sit down with office janitors Berko Pearce and Scott Sheldon where they also discussed the finer points of Joe Fleischer’s hair.
RM64: Can you give us a little background on yourself and how you got involved in the music & technology business?
EG: I’m a kid from Texas, most of the family is still there and I’m the one that got out. I take great pleasure in turning SXSW into like a three-week boondoggle and visit every distant relative and hang out on the lake. I played in bands unsuccessfully, knocked around Texas, then did the whole fraternity/sorority circuit for a while when I got out of school. I went to work as a management consultant and got the bug, being entrepreneurial, that is to say basically having a paycheck but not having a boss. So when I got really restless at that, I realized there was no less legitimate place to go, you’re already a consultant, so you can only go to unemployment. So I decided to start a company, what would become BigChampagne really. It was sort of set off like everything was in music and technology at that time, with the explosion and popularity of Napster. Napster happened and we thought there has to be an opportunity here for artists.
BC's Eric Garland, nice white teeth
RM64: Did you use Napster?
EG: Um, I had an occupational interest in Napster (smiles).
RM64: Strike that from the record.
EG: No, no, no, that’s actually a good story, the one part of my personal story that’s worth telling. I was helping out artist friends who had been helpful to me when I was trying to be an artist. One of my friends at that time, a great artist named Glen Phillips who had been the front man for Toad the Wet Sprocket, was starting his second career as an independent artist. I was sort of quasi-managing Glen, helping him a lot and I launched his first website. He wanted to do the whole e-commerce thing and sell his first solo record on his website, this is late ‘90s or early 2000’s. We were sitting around in the bar at Largo long after closing one night after he had done a little solo set, and he said, ‘What do you make of Napster?’ I said, ‘Just between you and me, I think it’s really cool. Does that offend you?’ And he said, ‘No! And that’s my problem.’ Everybody was so upset about Napster. Lars is going on about it, and Hillary Rosen is banging the drum and everybody’s threatening lawsuit. And he said, ‘As a guy who used to be in a band that people really loved, and as a guy who’s trying to draw some attention to what he’s doing now, I just wish I could let those people know that I’ve got a record and that I’m coming to town, or that I have a T-shirt that comes in lady’s sizes.’ You know, and his take was just so different. He was like, ‘I just think for most artists the first reaction should be that this is a community and it should be a tool set for me, and how do I exploit it to my advantage?’ And I was like, ‘that’s kinda cool.’
So I went and found this computer scientist buddy of mine and said, ‘what do you know about Napster? Tell me everything about Napster?’ Just by total chance he had met a group of other developers who had been working in this area of peer-mediated computing. He said, ‘Well, there are a lot of things we could do…’ And I said, ‘I’ve got this artist friend who really wants to find his fans on Napster and let them know what he’s doing now.’ He said, ‘let me think about that.’ Twenty-four hours later he tells me ‘I think I have something for you. I’ll have a prototype tonight at 7.’ Sure enough he showed me this amazing thing that he had very quickly thrown together. It was essentially a search engine that was collecting information about what people were searching for on Napster, what people were downloading and which artists people were adding to a playlist. Then we could segment that for purposes of marketing. So we did this little pilot with Glen Phillips where we approached Toad the Wet Sprocket fans and said, ‘hey, it’s Glen from Toad. I have a new record out and I’m giving away some mp3s, I have a tour calendar, and here it is.’ The conversion rate was unreal, it was getting like 20-25 percent conversions, we sold thousands of his independently released CDs off of glenphillips.com, a website that I was maintaining at that point out of my apartment in Fairfax. We just thought, ‘this is it. This is the future of the music industry.’ Little did we know that 10 years later that would almost be true. We were very eager and excited about what that first 6 months would hold, which was mostly pain and suffering.
RM64: So how did BigChampagne come into being?
EG: We did a few more of these experiments with artists after Glen Phillips. There was this sort of word of mouth thing in the artist community. Along the lines of, ‘these guys are doing this crazy stuff with Napster and online marketing.’ Then we started doing a lot of them. We worked with a whole bunch of L.A. bands, Bay Area bands and we got some press for that, and it was like, ‘hey these independent artists have a different attitude about Napster and they’re working with this technology start up.’ At that point there was still no name for it, you know, it wasn’t BigChampagne. It was just some guys.
Then I got a call from Jim Guerinot. And Jim said, ‘we get it, we think Napster is amazing.’ The Offspring wanted to put out their new record on Napster. That did not end up happening for reasons that had nothing to do with Guerinot or The Offspring, which I’m sure you know. But it started a really good conversation, and we did do some stuff to market and promote not just The Offspring, but a bunch of different bands of Jim’s. And through Jim we met the lawyer, of course. They always march the lawyer in, and that was Ken Hertz. He was effectively my co-founder, in that he was the one that looked at this little experiment of ours and said, ‘let’s turn this into a business, let’s build this. This could really be the path for the music industry with respect to Napster. This could be a better approach.’ And so it is, in a roundabout way, Kenny’s fault that I met Joe Fleischer.
RM64: Now at the time did you know of their (Ken & Joe) work with mp3.com?
EG: I was doing real-time research. I was Googling furiously. I guess this is before Google, so I was Yahooing to try to find out what I had fallen into. And yes, I was aware that they had worked together with varying degrees of success in the past.
RM64: Was this right after mp3.com?
EG: It was, it was virtually the same time. It’s when all these companies were falling through the door, were pouring into L.A., mostly from Northern California. And I will say this, completely unabashedly but also un-cynically, it could have gone so badly for us. This is the thing I think back on more often than anything else, you had a couple of smart geeks that had an idea and a little bit of technology. We basically showed up in Hollywood and said, ‘does anybody want to buy a watch?’
In hindsight, we could not have done better. We sort of fell into this little Largo community, where people loved music, were passionate about art and were all friends and invested in one another. That was great and really lucky. Then we caught the attention of slightly more powerful people in the business. During that time we sat down with everybody. And they were dazzled and wowed by the possibilities. It was cool to be knowledgeable and valuable to these people who were legendary. Who were we? We were somebody who knew something about Napster and that was a real currency, the elevator definitely got off on the top floor.
Kings of Pop: BC's Joe Fleischer (left) & Eric Garland (right)
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Las Vegas is the only place I know where money really talks–it says, “Goodbye.” — FRANK SINATRA
Well, Frank. We’ll soon walk the walk and talk the talk as we’re less than 2 weeks away from the Vegas Music Summit. The event happens Sept 23-24, 2009 and will feature 2 nights of showcases and 1 day of panels. RM 64 is offering complimentary industry badges and the daytime panels are FREE and open to the public. Did we mention…FREE!!! Our host hotel, the El Cortez has informed us that the VMS reserved rooms are sold out! But there are still some rooms available at the Fremont Hotel and the Golden Nugget. VMS sponsors include: SESAC, Miller Lite, BMI, Smash Magazine, A&R Knights, Hell Ya! and ASCAP. For more info, log on to: www.VegasMusicSummit.com. In the meantime, here’s a brief list of confirmed speakers:
Sara Berkowitz / Viper Room (Hollywood)
Joe Fleischer / BigChampagne
Jeff Sosnow / Interscope Records
Matt Messer / EMI Music Publishing
Jennifer Knoepfle / Sony-ATV Music
Mark Weinberg / Producer (O.A.R, Matt Nathanson)
Josh Feingold / SESAC
Tom DeSavia / Notable Music
Eric German / Mitchell, Silbbererg & Knupp
Jason Reynolds / Myspace Records
Josh Briggs / ASCAP
Jennie Smythe / Girlilla Marketing
Adrian Amadeo / Geffen Records
Eddie Meehan / GroundCtrl
Jon Nelson / Band Bitch
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Inside MySpace Record’s Artist Development Program; Q&A with Jason Reynolds
MySpace Records has been busy behind the scenes establishing a new unsigned artist development program called the Friends & Family Network. The initiative provides marketing for all participating artists across the MySpace Music platform to promote releases, tours and videos.
The label has also begun a new series of live shows in Los Angeles called Online [Offline], which features artists from the Friends and Family Network.
We recently sat down with MySpace Records’ Jason Reynolds to get the details.
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MSR's Jason Reynolds in signature shades
RM64: To start off can you tell us a little about your background?
JR: I’m originally from Australia where I used to run a record label putting out a bunch of indie rock records. Later I was worked for Shock Records in Australia, which also distributed Sub Pop, so I got to know a bunch of people there. When I lost my job at Shock, I got a call the day after from Jonathan at Sub Pop and he said, ‘What are you going to do now?’ And I said I don’t know, and he said ‘Come work for me in America.’ So I moved to Seattle in the 90’s, started the publishing company for Sub Pop, and then sort of migrated into working in A&R and doing product management. I signed a bunch of artists like Damien Jurado, Saint Etienne and The Jesus and Mary Chain.
In the late 90’s after leaving Sub Pop I did a stack of stuff like writing for the NME, music supervision as well as some musicology jobs, and then ended up in management.
I never really intended to become an artist manager, but I was always helping out the artists I knew; anytime there was a problem they kept calling me in to fix it. The first real client that I had was this kid Patrick Park. He was just a singer songwriter that I found at Genghis Cohen but he totally blew me away. He was like a modern day soul singer. So I ended up managing him and developing it from the ground up and subsequently sort of became the artist development-management guy.
Some of the other artists I worked with were The Belles from Lawrence, KS, Forward Russia! from the UK (on Mute), Every Move A Picture from San Francisco who got signed to V2, and then one of the biggest artists I managed was Isobel Campbell – who was previously in Belle and Sebastian. The first project that we did together was the record that she made with Mark Lanegan, Ballad of the Broken Seas. Crazily enough it took her from selling 10,000 records, which is what her previous record had done, to having a UK Top 40 album, getting nominated for a Mercury Music Prize and selling 150,000 copies of that record.
A little after that I dropped out of the music business for a couple years to become Mr. Mom.
RM64: So how did you end up at MySpace Records?
JR: I had been helping out the GM of MySpace Records J. Scavo. Every time he had a question, often times it related to international issues, I answered it. So he called me out of the blue one day and asked, ‘What are you plans?’ and I said ‘I don’t know’ and he said, ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ A large part of my position was to do international stuff for MySpace Records, but the main reason I got brought in was to run the artist development program that we have which is called the Friends and Family Network.
And that’s what I do on a daily basis. We have 130 artists signed-up, and what I do is I build marketing campaigns for unsigned artists on MySpace. The logic behind it being that we could have the next Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys or whatever in the program and we help build them from their 300 friends to 30,000 friends or their 250 plays a day to 70,000 plays a day. And it’s great. Now I do artist development and somebody pays me a salary for it.
RM64: So could you give us a little overview how of the MySpace Friends and Family program works?
JR: So the way that it works is that we dig around on MySpace Music to find unsigned bands that appeal to us, from the charts as well as traditional A&R and various ways you find out about bands through a friend, musician or whatever it is, and we sign them up to the program. The concept is we give them a set of marketing tools, so when they’re releasing an EP or have a tour or a video, I help them market their band on Myspace. So say an artist has a record coming out in the next couple months, I’ll build a marketing campaign with them. From there we have various tools to help them really hyper-target their marketing and get in front of users who we, collectively, think might like their music.
We also aid in getting editorial coverage. So if they have a video we will give them a music video feature. If they have an EP or album coming out, we’ll approach the editorial team at MySpace Music to try and find the right “look” for them, or if they have a video we will help with coverage on the music video page, which are amazing opportunities for unsigned artists. And then we have this one particular music ad that runs on the main music page where we promote tours and things like that as well. So really what we do is give them a tool kit to say ‘here you go, this is what you get allocated in a year –go crazy’. And it’s good. We have this particular artist from Long Beach that when I started my job they had 3,000 to maybe 5,000 plays a day. I would run marketing and see it go to maybe 10,000 plays a day. And now nine months later I run marketing, and they get 70,000 plays a day. That’s what the concept of it is, you’re building an artist from a small level to a big level.
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Hot Topic: DIY
The topic of DIY seems to be on the tongues of many lately, and it’s not quite the same ‘do it yourself’ of your punk rock granddad’s age. We participated in a panel last week on this topic, and were impressed by some of the forward-thinking initiatives we heard put forth by young artists in attendance. Conversation of a modern DIY era was also spawned this week by discussions at the New Music Seminar that took place on Tuesday in New York. While in the past a DIY mentality and approach was completely antithetical to the mainstream music business, the concepts and ideas being explored now are very much a part of a popular dialogue. Recent developments in this arena include the formation of Polyphonic, a UK-based venture that models itself on a new concept of label-artist partnerships and profit sharing, which was featured yesterday in a New York Times article. The fan-funded blueprint continues to push forward as well, with more new sites like Kickstarter.com that provide a platform for ideas and endeavors to find funding through pledges – endeavors such as recording an album or ep. In fact April Smith, an artist who we’ve spotlighted in the past, is currently taking pledges to fund her new full-length and is more than halfway to her goal in just two weeks. So while the jury is still out on many of the new “models”, the whirlwind of ideas and debate proceeds to energize innovation and creation in a space that was built upon those very things in the first place.
Checkout a couple recent interesting articles at Hypebot and Digital Music News for more on this topic.
06.17.09Will Changes at MySpace Affect Record Label?
Change is in the air at MySpace
Earlier this week, Myspace announced a 30% reduction in its workforce, dubbed a “return to start-up culture”, causing a clamor of questions both internally and in the media. So how will the new company direction under recently appointed CEO Owen Van Natta (former COO at Facebook) affect Myspace Records? Spared from the initial cuts, we hear Van Natta is still assessing the future direction of the company’s record division. Regardless of the recent negative press, Myspace remains a social networking giant with an elevated platform in online music, which Facebook does not possess. Therefore, will the record division play a diminished or an even expanded role in the new MySpace regime? Recent breakout artists such as Colbie Caillat, Lilly Allen and even recent bidding-derby act Never Shout Never effectively harnessed Myspace’s social networking reach to garner a legion of fans and industry attention alike. With that said, will Van Natta redirect the record division to its full potential? Stay tuned…
12.23.08YouTube Blues for ADA too?
After Warner Music Group’s recent announcement concerning the removal of all WMG content from YouTube, industry insiders are asking what effect this policy will have on Alternative Distribution Alliance, WMG’s indie label distributor? Can we expect ADA to make a similar motion by requesting all its partner labels it distributes to pull their content from the online video site as well? And will ADA-distributed labels comply? The video site is now a widely-used marketing/promotion tool. What’s certain is that we can expect the rocky relationship between major labels and YouTube to continue in the new year. Stay tuned…
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