Q&A Leftovers: A User’s Guide to the Bidding Derby
RM 64 on deadline...
After Myspace Records’ Jason Reynolds stopped by the RM 64 offices for our interview with him, we uncovered an interesting tidbit left on tape during the post-interview banter. The off-the-record discussions and gossip from our interview sessions have been quite eye-opening. It makes for good industry fodder to post when our editorial staff is feeling lazy or in this case, are nursing a hangover. So we hope you enjoy a little inside story concerning the signing of a certain Australian rock act that went on to sell millions of records. We start with Mr. Reynolds and RM 64 poser-journalist Rodel Delfin reminiscing about their shenanigans and what started out as a bet.
RM64: Jason, a friend asked me the other day about Jet signing to Elektra Records several years ago. He had heard that you and I were somewhat involved with stirring that up. It was definitely a fierce bidding derby. I recall the band was starting to garner a lot of industry attention in Australia, where the band is from. I was the A&R Editor at Hits Magazine at the time, and you and I would talk about new music and bands coming across your scene. And I remember you handing me the Jet demo. How did you come across them and what was happening at the time?
JR: My friend David Vodicka, who was running Rubber Records, also ran a company called Media Arts Lawyers in Melbourne, Australia. Basically, he had found Jet and told me that I need to know about this band. It was one of those things, when I was listening to the demo –like ‘oh holy shit.’
RM64: It’s funny because I pulled the demo from my old archives, and it had “Are You Going to Be My Girl?” and “Cold Hard Bitch” along with four other tracks.
JR: Yeah, it was basically half of the album and actually all of the songs that ended up being singles. It was definitely one of those no-brainer situations.
RM64: So you had it. What was happening in Australia at the time?
JR: All of the majors in Australia had heard about it and approached it. And I know through a couple of those labels it had filtered out a little bit overseas. Then David had contacted me to talk to people over here. He and I had that kind of relationship where I would help him connect the dots with A&R people in the states. And that was it. Then you became my conduit because most of the A&R people weren’t taking my calls.
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)
| Posted in Interviews, RM64 Features, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Oh how Notable it is: Q&A with Music Publishers Damon Booth & Tom DeSavia
Notable Music Founder Cy Coleman
**UPDATE 9/01/09: Notable Music and IODA announce new partnership, read the press release HERE
With a diverse and impressive publishing roster that includes music legend Cy Coleman and an amazing Jamaican music catalog, the crew from Notable Music is marking their territory in the new music landscape. The boutique pubco’s Damon Booth and Tom DeSavia recently sat down for a little Q&A sesh with RM 64 knuckleheads Rodel Delfin and Scott Sheldon.
RM 64: Before we get into the inner workings of Notable, share with us your industry backgrounds.
DB: I’ll start considering the guy who moved me to LA from Chicago is sitting right next to me. I started my career working for ASCAP in their Midwest office and Tom (DeSavia) was my boss. When he left to work at Elektra Records in the late 90s, ASCAP moved me to Los Angeles and I took over Pop music membership at the PRO. From there I went to EMI Publishing where I was a Creative exec for a few years and then crossed over to the label side, doing A&R at Warner Brothers Records.
During this period I was introduced to an amazing songwriter who later became my brother-in-law, named Cy Coleman. He was also an independent music publisher as he had never sold his publishing and he had this great American Songbook collection. We ended up becoming very close.
When Cy passed away suddenly in 2004, I left Warner Bros. to keep his little boutique company, Notable Music up and running, thus keeping it a family business. I’ve been doing that for three years now and we moved the company from New York City to Pasadena, CA two years ago. And I was fortunate enough to have Tom come on board earlier this year as VP of Creative.
TD: For me, I started as a music journalist for a publication called Cash Box. I was later asked to interview at ASCAP. I got the gig and ended up staying there for seven years before going to Elektra Records where I did A&R for six years. After that I went back to ASCAP for an additional eight years, heading up the West Coast membership staff.
Over the years, Damon and I have been such good friends that joining him at Notable is really like a kid’s fantasy. To have the opportunity to work together after so many years is amazing.
RM 64: On to Notable, how did it start?
DB: Notable was started in 1962 by Cy Coleman. He was widely considered one of the last of the great American Songbook legends. He was the baby of that group which included Cole Porter, George Gershwin, as well as contemporaries like Sammy Cahn and Stephen Sondheim. He had a couple of huge hits during his early 20’s and wrote for Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., collaborators who at the time were much older lyricists than him.
A lot of the writers he was working with didn’t want to sign their publishing away to someone they didn’t know, so they signed with Cy. And he kept signing writers that loved him and that he trusted. And they trusted him.
Cy could identify talent really early, but he wasn’t trying to sign anyone and everyone. His philosophy was, ‘I’m a songwriter, I’m going to take care of my own songs and other artists who I trust and want to work with.’ But he had a career writing and performing everyday. And you know, even though the songs were standards, you have to work them just as hard as a new project because they will fade and people will forget them.
DeSavia (left) & Booth (right) circa early 90s, with their spiritual guide, Francisco (middle)
RM 64: What were some of your goals when taking over the company?
DB:Things weren’t going the right direction when I came in, so we took over the catalog and moved administration through Chrysalis Publishing, who has been amazing partners. Right away they brought up the idea to do a tribute album of Cy’s work. I thought it was a great idea. They introduced us to Dave Palmer, an L.A. based producer, arranger and musician, and we brought in some contemporary singers to do Cy’s songs in new arrangements. The idea was to present something new to these standards so people wouldn’t expect what they heard. We’re trying to bring in a new audience to match the name with the music and keep the legacy going. The tribute album which will be coming out via New West Records features Fiona Apple, Patti Griffin, Ambrosia Parsley, Missy Higgins and a variety of great artists who knew and loved Cy’s songs.
| Posted in Interviews, RM64 Features, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
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.
—
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.
| Posted in Interviews, RM64 Features, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
RM64 Q&A: Bill Armstrong & Joe Sib / SideOneDummy Records
SideOneDummy Records Founders Joe Sib & Bill Armstrong
There are a handful of independent record labels out there today that are filling the gap between mom and pop operation and major label behemoth. Home to platinum sellers and international touring artists, these indie-ecosystems provide a place where music, community and commerce combine in a way rarely seen in the confines of corporate entertainment companies. SideOneDummy Records is one of those labels and over the past 14 years they have grown from two friends in a Hollywood apartment, to a business with worldwide presence, hundreds of releases and an impressive roster of artists including: Flogging Molly, The Gaslight Anthem, Gogol Bordello, Fake Problems, Dusty Rhodes, Bedouin Soundclash, The Casualties and many others.
RM64 dimwits Rodel Delfin and Scott Sheldon sat down with SideOne head honchos Bill Armstrong and Joe Sib at their Hollywood office.
RM64: When you started the label over a decade ago, did you have a specific plan or goal in mind?
BA: When we started, the goal was to see if we could do this and not have a real job. And to not have to report to anybody or answer to anyone. That was really it. As long as we could get a cup of coffee and a bagel in the morning, we were good.
| Posted in Interviews, Uncategorized | No Comments »