Music Business and Trend Mongering

I participated in a panel at MIT a couple weeks back, discussing the future of music with some folks I have a ton of respect for: Nancy Baym (University of Kansas), João Brasil (Brazilian artist), Chuck Fromm (Worship Leader Media), Erin McKeown (musical artist and fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University) and Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest).  The Futures of Entertainment folks just made the video available. It’s long (two hours!) but I think we covered a fair amount of ground without getting boring.

Check it out:

My mentor at Rykodisc, Jill Christiansen, used to talk about the “mystery” associated with rolling out an artist campaign. For example, when going through a photo shoot to determine which image to use for promo, perhaps consider the sly, slightly-out-of-focus image as opposed to the straight on shot that “gives everything away.” It’s an interesting idea, given this age of everything being instant, with artists laying it all on the table immediately with social media and everything else.

Anyway, below is a great example of an artist that’s playing it close to the vest with an upcoming release. I have no idea what this release is – a DVD or future audio release – but I’m intrigued enough to give my email so I can find out. OF COURSE it doesn’t hurt that the band is Sigur Rós, OF COURSE they have a massive fan base, but I think it’s a solid example of a band properly rolling out a campaign that relies on subtlety and mystery perfectly focused on a core group of fans, as opposed to unfocused repetition and noise out of the gate. Cool approach.

I met up with Owain Kelly, the bassist from the band Tigers that Talked, in March at SXSW. Here’s a video the band created during their time in Austin:

Tigers that Talked was a co-winner (along with Sonoio) of Topspin’s grant competition, which I helped judge along with some heavy hitters, like Rick Rubin, Marc Geiger, Richard Jones, Glenn Peoples, and Jennie Smythe. Owain and the band created and executed a compelling new-school music marketing plan, and I thought it might be helpful if I took a minute to lay out some of what this band did, and what they are continuing to do, from a sales and marketing perspective. Most impressive in my opinion was the band’s product and pricing strategy and execution, as well as their approach to PR and overall communications. Check out an interview I did with Owain from a few weeks back:

Band Background

Mike King: Can you talk a little bit about the background of the band, your ideas for the campaign, and what you were trying to accomplish?

Owain Kelly: I got together with Jamie, Chris, and Glenna after graduating from school. We all just kind of came together and we really liked what we were doing, so we went forward with it. We ended up signing to a local independent label. It was great at the time – we recorded the album and the label essentially turned around and said that they couldn’t release it. So we went through the whole process with them and eventually got the rights to the album ourselves, because we were very proud of it and we still wanted to release it.

MK: Were they not releasing it for creative reasons, or were they not releasing it for financial reasons?

OK: I think it was financial reasons. They aren’t even a label anymore. They are still a management company but they aren’t a label anymore. So I just think in the long run, they couldn’t do it. So we had this album that we finally got the rights to and we decided that instead of searching for another label, we could release it ourselves. We really just wanted to get the album out there and heard. You know, it’s the debut album, and a lot of people worked very hard to pull it together. We really just wanted to get it out there, get it sold and heard by people who had actually been waiting for it for quite awhile.

Process: Doing it Yourself with Help

MK: So when you say you put it out there yourself, was it just the four of you that were responsible for all the marketing and sales initiatives, or did you have some other folks that were helping out?

OK: We also have our manager, Ritchie. We had a radio plugger for the campaign but we didn’t have a press plugger. We did all of our press ourselves.

MK: I want to get into what you did with press because I think it’s fascinating, but I’m interested in knowing what else you guys were doing yourselves. Didn’t you also create your website?

OK: Yeah, absolutely. Essentially, the way that came about was another economic restraint. We had this kind of holding page website which we’ve had for years when we first started the band, made by the same guy who did the album artwork. It was a very simple one page that would just redirect you to the label’s website and it would direct you to our MySpace; there were just two links on it. We decided that we needed something a bit more substantial and we just couldn’t afford to go and get someone else to do it. Eventually we kind of talked about it, Ritchie and the four of us, and we agreed, “let’s just go for this and try and do it ourselves.” None of us had any form of web experience, no coding experience; basic Photoshop experience is really all we had. So we did a lot of online tutorials, chatted with friends who do a lot of web design; we just taught ourselves, and it took about a years worth of banging our head against the wall to get something that we were happy with. We kind of succeeded in the primary goal of making a website in about three months, it just took another nine months of honing skills to actually get a decent looking website that we were all happy with.

MK: It’s something that people talk about a lot, the fact that it is difficult to be writing and recording music, producing your own music, and then doing all the marketing yourself. Did you find that you were stretched thin by doing all the press and all the web design and updates?

OK: I have to say, without kind of just wanting to pat them on the back, it genuinely helps to have a service like Topspin involved to help with the direct communication with our fans. It is a lot of work, and it does take up a lot of time, but if you aren’t prepared to do that for your fans, then why are you even bothering to play the music? The fans are there, they want to hear from you, and I think the fans respond differently when they know that you’re making your own website and you’re doing all your own press. The more you can do yourself, the better. It’s really inspiring when you finish something you’ve done on your own, and while it might have taken you slightly longer than it would taken someone else to do it, I think it’s motivating to have a real stake in every aspect of your band as a business. With direct to fan interaction, we are getting the opportunity to tailor make our entire future and to do it in response to the people that are making this happen for us. Of course, there is a really difficult side to all of this, but it’s exciting!

Acquisition and PR Campaign

Email for Media Widget

MK: Can you talk a little bit about the techniques you used to make folks aware of you, and how you acquired permission-based contact with new fans? How did you do this on your own site and on third party sites?

OK: One of the big things we used for the acquisition stage of the campaign was the email for media widget through Topspin. Three weeks before the album came out we created an email for media widget and put it in a really prominently place on our site. The idea was that it was the first thing fans and potential fans saw when they visited the site, and we exchanged a free track for an email address. Kind of simple stuff really. But we also used the email for media widgets in the wild, too. You know, anytime we approached anyone in the press, we tried to hit him or her with the free email for media widgets. If they were going to mention that an album was coming out, we’d ask them to embed the e4m’s as well. And it worked! Using Topspin’s retrieved data we saw that the email for media widget we were using has been viewed almost 14,000 times, and from those views, the e4m was clicked around 1500 times, acquiring more than 900 new emails alone in the process. These are all people that we can connect with for this current record, as well as records down the line.

MK: You also had a dedicated EPK and content page on your site that only press could access, right?

OK: Yeah, we had that as well. That was another thing, the press page that we set up on our site. I mean that again came up quite incidentally, we were just having a conversation and said, “You know what? We’ve got this page for the fans where they arrive on the site and they can instantly go to where we want them to go, so why don’t we make one for press?” So we hid a URL that wasn’t hooked up to our navigation on the actual site, and we embedded the full album, we embedded a link where press could downloaded the full album, downloaded the press release, the bios; everything that actually goes into a normal press release by an email, except that this was a live URL so that they weren’t dealing with an email that just looked like the rest of the other emails. The emails to our targeted press list were very, very short and to the point. We’d send them out and they essentially just had this link in it that said, “if you are interested in this band, here’s a press link” and if they click on that, it would take them to fully dedicated page just for them, complete with a way to contact that management, to contact us, a way to explore the site and download content.

Tigers That Talked Press Page

MK: How did you focus your press outreach?

OK: We did a couple of things. First, we looked at everyone we ever talked to back from the first EP that we released, and we targeted those folks with a really personalized email. It looked a lot less like a press email, and it was from our personal accounts. We’d email these folks and say, “Hey, we’ve got this album coming out. Here’s the album for free with the press download.” This approach was really successful actually, we got some really great blogs that responded well. The second thing we did was that we created our own database from trolling through sites that we liked and pulling out email addresses of writers that we thought might like our music.

MK: Can you talk a little bit about the results? I know you were touring at the time. Were you getting more record release press or tour press?

OK: It was more record release press and we had a few tour presses, mainly for the lead show; we did an album launch show at one of the local venues and we had a few reviewers come down and do that. We also had quite a few interviews – one of the biggest local leads that did a full cover feature on us and did a full length interview. We’ve done some other things with press, like the PRS acoustic session we did and the Amazing Radio acoustic session. I think it’s nice to see the quality of the press hits and the longevity that you can have if you approach your campaign in a personal way.

Sales Strategy:

MK: So you’ve got some momentum with press and live events, you are building up your permission based contacts, and you’re engaging with your fans regularly. Can you talk a little bit about your ideas behind your graduated pricing campaign and your variable product offerings?

OK: Late last year, we released our album, The Merchant on a graduated pricing model. We did a four-week graduated pricing campaign where the price of the record ranged from £1.00 if you purchased early, up to £4.00. So the first week you could get it for £1.00, the second week you could get it for £2.00, third week for £3.00, fourth week for £4.00. We really wanted to reward the fans that had waited months between the recording and the release of the record. We just wanted to make it incredibly cheap so that anyone who was already a fan, who was waiting for it to come out, could get the record for the lowest price possible. Along side of the digital release, we were selling a t-shirt as well as the physical CD. We sold the CD for £5.00 and we sold the t-shirt for £12.00. We also created another bundle, at £15.00, which was all the digital downloads, the CD, and the t-shirt all together.

It was interesting to see that 58% of total revenue from the campaign came from the first week when we were offering a £1.00 digital download, and the average purchase on the site ended up being £4.48. So a lot of fans were buying some of our more expensive items. Overall, 18.3% of purchasers opted for the more expensive options we provided.

We followed The Merchant release with a ‘pay-what-you-want’ EP called Battles, featuring exclusive tracks, remixes and 4 pieces of graphic art we designed ourselves. We offered a variety of suggested donations, from £1.00 up to £25.00. We found that 67.9% of fans opted to pay more than the lowest suggested price of £1.00, while the highest option of £25.00 accounted for 47.5% of our total revenue.

Battles EP Donation Release Strategy

Communication Strategy

MK: Can we talk a little more about how you are communicating with folks? There was obviously some demand for this record, even though there was a while between recording and releasing in. How did you maintain this interest through messaging and communication?

OK: We run our own website, so all the blog posts come from us and we try and write at least one blog a week. We don’t like to bombard fans with emails. We don’t ever want to be an irritation for them so we try to send out about one email to the list maybe once a month. Every month, we’ll send out an email saying what we’ve been up to, what we are going to do next, that kind of thing. Facebook has been a great channel for us as well. We’re on our Facebook page all the time and all the posts on the Facebook come directly from us. We’ve found it to be a great way to have a direct and immediate participatory relationship with our fans.

Our overall strategy is that we’re all music fans at the end of the day, and we know what irritates us and we know what really inspires us, and what captures our imagination, and it’s just a case of looking at that and putting yourself in your fan’s shoes. You know, I wouldn’t want to have an email everyday, not even from my favorite band; barely every week. Once a month with what’s going on is a nice level of email communication. I also think it’s important for us to make sure our fans know that the Facebook and the Twitter posts all come direct from us. They are not talking to a representative or a PR agent; they are getting to hear what we’re actually saying and what were actually doing. It’s just brilliant that there are plenty of mediums now where you can reach your fans so directly.

Check out more on Tigers that Talked here

This is a guest post by my friend Dennis Carlson.

Dennis and I started our music careers in the 90s at Rykodisc, which at the time was a mid-sized independent record label based out of Salem, MA. While our careers have gone in different directions since our start at Ryko (I moved onto Berklee in Boston, and Dennis founded an insurance agency in CA), I was pretty excited to meet up with Dennis this past year at SXSW and learn that he’s getting back into the music business. After talking with Dennis for a couple of minutes at the Gayngs shows, I realized what a resource he was for musicians who are interested in learning more about best practices with health care. I asked him to put together a quick overview of options and tips, which you can read below. Follow Dennis @gaslighteast

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I am an ex-artist manager, current health insurance agent, and aspiring music licensing guru and this March I was fortunate enough to attend SXSW in Austin. My evenings were filled with amazing music by soon-to-be-known bands like The Naked and the Famous, once-known-and-back-again power rockers the Smoking Popes, and too-cool-to-ever-really-be-known smart hip hoppers Gayngs. During the day, on the other hand, I opted to hit up as many panels as possible. The first panel I attended was titled “Break a Leg! Musicians and Health Care Reform”. The purpose of the panel was to provide artists with information on the health care reform bill that was passed last year and discuss the options for coverage.

The panel highlighted the problem artists have finding health insurance coverage and provided valuable resources to assist with this problem. A notable panelist was Rogue Wave drummer Pat Spurgeon who discussed his experience waiting for a kidney transplant. His saga is chronicled in the gut-wrenching documentary “D-tour”.

As someone who assists individuals and small business owners every day in finding health insurance, I know these struggles all too well, but I also know a few tricks.
Here are some tips for navigating the health insurance world based upon on my experiences, and while they provide no guarantee of getting coverage, they should give some guidance and direction.

1) Find a reputable health insurance agent. This is probably the most important step. Agents know much more about health insurance than you do and will only be paid if you secure a health insurance policy. Despite what many people assume, it doesn’t cost you any more money to use an insurance agent than if you simply bought a policy directly from the insurance company. To find an agent in your area go to www.nahu.org and click Find an Agent.

2) Determine if you can qualify as a small business. If you are a band that is producing even modest revenue, then it might make sense to form a simple business entity like a partnership, LLC, or maybe even a corporation. Or if you are a solo artist, and can show Schedule C income when you file your taxes some insurance companies will treat you like a small business and offer the exact same plans and rates that any small business would qualify for. In California, if you are a sole-proprietor with Schedule C income and are married and file taxes jointly, Kaiser Permanente will offer you a small group health plan, with no medical questions.

3) Look into associations you are (or could be) a member of. Many industry associations and chambers of commerce have health plans available to their members. Many times the association dues are modest and the criteria to qualify as a member of the association are minimal. One such association is the Freelancers Union. Membership is free and members are eligible for the association health plans (and many other benefits too). At the moment, the health plan is only available to qualified freelancers who are residents of New York State. Think about what you do and then put your Google skills to work to find an association that fits you.

4) Check out your State sponsored options. Currently most states have some form of government sponsored health care available. Depending on your state, annual income, household size and other factors, you may qualify for assistance. The easiest way to figure out what you qualify for is to call the US Uninsured Help Line at 800-234-1317 or use the on-line eligibility tool at www.coverageforall.org . I’ve personally used this free service for individuals.

5) Check with your parents. One benefit of the health care reform bill that is already in effect is the ability for children under the age of 26 to stay (or rejoin) their parents health insurance plan. In the past, dependents between 19 and 25 had to be full-time students but this is no longer the case. If you are under 26 and your parents have health insurance ask them to inquire about what it takes to get on the plan.

Between now and 2014 we’re going to see many changes to the health care system, the way insurance companies are regulated, and individual access to coverage and care. What you knew about insurance last year is probably irrelevant, and by this time next year I’m confident the same will be true. The Federal government has done a decent job compiling information about changes at www.healthcare.gov, but be sure to utilize multiple sources to get the best and most current information. You are your best advocate.

Dennis Carlson owns Bespoke Benefits, an insurance agency in Davis, California. He also runs Gaslight-East an artist development and licensing company. He loves distilling the complexities of health insurance and the music business for anyone who asks. Follow him @gaslighteast

I had Matt Stine as a student in the inaugural run of my Online Music Marketing with Topspin course, and it’s a thrill to see him put the sales and marketing tactics we discussed in the course into practice with his artist Clinton Curtis. It’s equally thrilling to see his work presented in outlets that I admire, like Mike Masnick’s Techdirt.

I’ve pasted Matt’s guest post in Techdirt below. Congratulations Matt!

Case Study: Clinton Curtis Connects With Fans And Gives Them Good Reasons To Buy His New Album

These are just a few of the things that are unique about this campaign although there are many others (including the “Turn This CD Into A Coaster” Kit that comes with each disc!). Have a look over at clintoncurtis.com to see the package offers in more detail and explore around the site to see more ways Clinton is actively connecting with his fanbase. I would love to hear people’s thoughts and ideas on what we could be doing better. I always keep reminding our team that this is all an experiment and we need to adapt and change every day as we learn from the feedback we get from our fans. So visit the site and help us out!

I had the opportunity to present at MIDEM in Cannes a couple of weeks ago. Check out a video of my “Direct to Fan: From Foundation to Execution” presentation below. Unfortunately, whomever edited this video cut out my intro – which I delivered in French! I assume my pronunciation was part of the editors decision making process.

I think there’s no debate that a part of the future of music is going to include an access (as opposed to ownership) approach to listening to music. On a large scale, music consumers have always chosen convenience over almost everything else, and the opportunity to listen to as much music as possible, anytime and anywhere, whether connected to the Internet or not, is a compelling proposition. And while I think it’s only a matter of time before Apple gets the licensing together to re-activate some version of LaLa, there are some great services out there in the US and abroad right now that offer a really compelling approach to music in the cloud.

I’ve been checking out Rdio for the past few months, and been really impressed with what they are up to. They have a pretty extensive catalog (made all the more extensive in recent weeks with the addition of the Beggars Group catalog), and interesting social media tools to help with music discovery.

I spoke with Rdio’s CEO, Drew Larner, a couple weeks back about the service. Here’s our conversation:

Mike: Can you tell me a little bit about the background of Rdio, and how you became involved with the company?

Drew: Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, who were the founders of Skype, are the founders of Rdio, and they are the ones who have been funding it for the last two plus years. I met them first in 2000 and started working for them in about 2003, when they were just kind of getting out of the Kazaa phase of their careers. So it was interesting to meet them at that point because I had come from the film business, I had worked in the film industry for twelve years. To meet them with all that was going on – it was an interesting change for me. Shortly thereafter they started Skype, and then Joost, and now Rdio. So they’ve done a lot of things, and I’ve worked with them in fits and starts over all of that period.

Mike: I talk about Rdio in some of my courses, and one question that always comes up is “Okay, Rdio sounds great, but how do I get my music on the service as an independent artist?” Is there an opportunity for folks that are unsigned to get their music on Rdio?

Drew: We don’t have a self-serve option yet. There are aggregators out there that we’re speaking with that effectively provide that service for artists. You know, content aggregation for a service like this, is a long, and I don’t want to say tedious process, because it’s not, it’s an interesting process, but it’s a long process. So to provide a catalog that you are going to charge people for, you are going to need the building blocks, which are obviously the major labels and the major Indies. You get the publishing deals in place and you start adding to the catalog over time. So right now, we’re at seven million plus tracks. Very, very deep catalog. But like you’ve said, there are lots of great indie artists out there who aren’t yet at a label or may never want to go to a label. The paradigm may be changing where they don’t need to sign with a label and you understand that stuff better than I do. As far as marketing directly, we don’t have a self-service option yet and I don’t think it’s in our future over the short-term but I think once we sign with an aggregator that is a more geared towards indie artists, then that would be the way that they can get on Rdio.

Mike: So, from an overview, you are starting with the big guys, which makes sense in trying to get all of the content that the larger population is going to be interested in, and then your going to be moving down the line into working with an aggregator that is more focused on independent artists. Is that accurate?

Drew: No. I mean we’ve already done deals with IODA and some of the bigger Indie aggregators – what I was referring to simply is almost self-serve. So I guess I’d term it non-label indie artists. Those who aren’t signed to any label but are producing music that they want to be distributed. Yeah, we’ll get there.

Mike: Maybe through a partnership with CDBaby or TuneCore.

Drew: Exactly.

Mike: How difficult is it for you to get the licensing deals done right now, as opposed to three years ago? Is there a shift that you are seeing with the majors where they are saying, “Streaming is definitely going to be part of the future and we have to get our content on there?”

Drew: Well, our deals are done. We needed the deals in place before we could launch the service but it is a very good question because it was an iterative process in that, when we started this over two years ago, we were trying to figure out what the right model was. We were looking at companies that were doing ad-based premium type models and personally, because I am the one who was on the hook for defending the model that we choose to my board and my investors, I didn’t really believe in that ad supported model because the ad revenue doesn’t come in at a level that is significant enough to pay for the royalty costs. You know, I come from the content world and I believe content is valuable and needs to be treated as such, so it’s not that the royalty costs are out of line, they are what they are because this stuff is valuable.

So we kind of thought about what kind of model we wanted, and we decided to move towards the subscription model. The majors, as we were negotiating our deals, were moving in that direction as well. There were subscription services out there already, of course, but the functionality in those services are not as robust as they are now. I think the most important change is the offline caching, which if you are using mobile, you are hopefully using a lot because we think that is kind of the light bulb moment. You know, “Wait a second! I can turn my Android phone into a iPod!” You know, “I have a Blackberry and I can play a thousand songs on my Blackberry!” So it creates a single device strategy, and that kind of functionality is something that over the course of the negotiations came into the deal.

Mike: Are there any limitations to how much music you can cache?

Drew: The only real limitations are on the functionality side – what your device storage limit is. If you have a lot of storage on your device, you can store as many songs are you want. On the deal side, once you stop subscribing, your music is no longer available. But that’s the concept of moving, in terms of the model, from an ownership model to an access model. Meaning that you don’t need to physically purchase every song because they are all there. Why would you need to purchase anymore when you have access to everything?

Mike: Are there any other major partnerships that are on the horizon for Rdio that people can look towards in 2011 that you can talk about?

Drew: On the content side?

Mike: Yes.

Drew: We’re doing deals all the time. While we do have some announcements coming, my PR people would get pissed at me if I blew the lid off. So there is nothing specific I can speak to, but I can promise that stuff is coming. Again, it’s a process where you get those cornerstone building blocks that everybody needs for service, and from there you start adding more and more interesting elements. Whether its world music or classical music or additional deeper jazz – it’s a process! We have someone in-house who is very good and very savvy, and she is just continually doing deals. It’s just that it’s time consuming.

Mike: I was really pleased to see the Beggars Group up there.

Drew: I would agree. I’m very, very excited that Beggars is on there and by extension now, the Arcade Fire. It’s very important to have that extensive catalog.

Mike: Can you speak a little bit to the social component of Rdio and music discovery using the service?

Drew: We keep pushing new updates to the clients constantly and just keep making it a better experience in terms of finding new people to follow and giving you more information as far as new music and music that we think you would like, that we believe is unique and based on people rather than algorithms. Now we do have an algorithmic approach, I don’t know if you checked out the radio that we have? So for me, I like that because I am more of a passive listening guy. If I want to listen to Wilco, I can create a fantastic play list with Wilco, the Jayhawks, and Son Volt; that does it for me. Other people want a more core discovery experience, so we’re constantly updating and making it better, but social is really the core to our DNA. The fact is music brings people together. Music is a social conversation and that sense of community is what we really built this service around, and we believe that this differentiates us from the other services in the marketplace. We believe we’ve created a way to accurately & interestingly filter all that music to give users an experience where, instead of just a static search and play where you need to know what you want to listen to, you can come back to Rdio not just everyday but every hour and you will see new stuff! That we really believe is unique and creates a great experience.

Mike: Are you working with a third party like The Echo Nest here in Somerville for your radio algorithm, or is that homegrown?

Drew: It’s homegrown. We’re all in-house, everything is built in house. We don’t outsource, we really have a fantastic engineering and design team, and you’ve seen the result of it. It’s in-house.

Excellent acoustic cover of a song from one of my favorite records of 2010.

Jónsi – Go Do [Acoustic] – Live at Origami from plastic pearl on Vimeo.

From the LA Times Pop & Hiss Music Blog

“There are a few very valid reasons to be nervous about playing an in-store at Origami Vinyl; loading gear in up its perilous spiral staircase, the remote chance of plummeting off the loft into the crowd, Ali the Boxer dog witholding hugs in judgment of your set. (Full disclosure: I’ve played at Origami Records in my other life as a drummer, and received Ali hugs.)

We may never truly know why Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi pulled the ripcord on his planned acoustic record-store tour after playing Origami last month (he cited paralyzing nervousness at the set’s intimacy, which was unexpected for a singer who headlines the world’s biggest venues with Sigur Rós). But Origami and director Jack Schlinkert just posted two gorgeous clips from the show, each of songs from Jónsi’s recent solo album, “Go.” His otherworldly falsetto is pristine and betrays no trace of what he was feeling at the time, so enjoy these clips as the best evidence that a show like this actually happened, because it apparently won’t happen again.”

I hijacked the Topspin blog yesterday to talk about our Online Music Marketing with Topspin course, which starts this Monday, September 27th. We’ve opened up a sample lesson from the course, which you can access here (you’ll be required to register with Berkleemusic if you have not already). The post I wrote for Topspin is below:

We’ve been teaching the Topspin course at Berkleemusic for just under a year, and personally, it’s been one of the more rewarding things that I’ve been involved in. To get emails like the following from online students really reinforces the fact that we are doing something positive and immediately applicable for musicians and their career:

Subject: Brian Ray Pre-Sale + Topspin Marketing = Success!!

Fiona

I’ve given a bunch of Online Music Marketing with Topspin course demos to folks here at the college, to successful musicians that are visiting our school, and to musician friends that need a hand understanding some of the best practices associated with online music marketing. I thought it might be helpful for all of you to take a look inside our course too, so we made one of the 12 lessons available for free, here (you’ll need to register on our site to view). This is lesson 6 in the course, which talks about forecasting, product and pricing considerations, Topspin’s orders section, and more. This is an archive of a section of the course that my colleague and Topspin ninja, Jason Kadlec, taught earlier this year. If you decide to check it out, be sure to look at the class forum (up top), the assignment page, and Jason’s archived chat. This will give you a good understanding of the communication and interaction between the students and the instructor – the course is a whole lot more than static copy on a page. You’re working with musicians, marketers, and managers from around the world, and led by an instructor that is an expert in Topspin and online music marketing. Again, this is just one of the lessons in the 12-week course, and we go through a ton of topics covering all things online (and some offline) marketing related.

I’m more than happy to chat with anyone about the course. If you want to reach me, I’m at mking [at] berklee.edu. As I mentioned we’re starting a new term on September 27th. Hope to see you online.

Mike

Gail Zappa, daughter of a rocket scientist, mother of Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva Zappa, was married to the legendary composer Frank Zappa for more than 25 years. Since Frank Zappa’s death in 1993, she has overseen the release of his recordings, including many previously unavailable works, under the Zappa Family Trust.

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Gail recently about a number of topics, including copyright, offering Frank’s music direct to fans on www.zappa.com, and her opinion of third party online retail.

Mike: Can you talk a little bit about the process for choosing the material you and Joe Travers release from the vault?

Gail: Well, I think Joe has a very different process than mine. He’s a fan, which he has been since he was very young, long before we ever met him. First of all, he realizes that he gets to listen to stuff that no one else will ever hear in some cases. So that’s a very attractive part of the job for him and sad at the same time. He’s also interested in finding the source material that Frank used, in finding all of the bits and pieces. Or if he hears about a legendary project, he’ll work on reconstituting it because some of the ingredients of the sauce are missing. So there is a search and seizure part of it that he is always actively engaged in so when he goes into the vault, he usually has a motive; I don’t. That’s the difference; he’s looking for something in particular, usually. The collaboration happens when…. Oh what just happened recently? We sat down (in his office) and I said, “Joe, I need a really good concert and it has to be English. It has to be from Britain” and he said, “OK!” So he knows right where to go because he’s been through there so many times, that he knows. He says, “I think I know some choices” and he makes a selection based on that and then we find out, we’re not covered for a whole concert but we’re covered for several dates at the same time, so that we can pick and choose in terms of the performances. Sometimes you get a concert and that’s it; it’s a one shot deal and you have to go warts & all with what you’ve got and you don’t have the coverage. So, in that case, we’ve gone to fans and gotten bootleg recordings to fill in the blanks when the tape ran out and the reel didn’t get changed fast enough. So you can start with that or you can go to “well, we did several shows in this location over a period of time;” say three Halloween dates in New York. Then you can make one show from all three sources; that’s a different kind of an event. For me, the rule of thumb is, we are not making a Frank Zappa recording in terms of how its produced, but we are making a record from recordings made by Frank; that’s the big difference. There are two of us and that means there’s four feet and there is no way that they are going to fit in those two shoes.

Mike: Are you or Joe releasing material from the vault based on fan demand?

Gail: No. We’ve been releasing things based on what we think is a good thing to release. Joe makes classic arguments over and over again for releasing certain types of things that he’s knows the fans are interested in and those arguments that he makes influence some of the releases, in terms of what the contents might be; I certainly consider his opinion absolutely but my first obligation to Frank is to educate. First, you have to have a context in which you can release these things. For me, I can’t just put out a record and not have some background to it. Recently, we put out The Torture Never Stops as a DVD and this was made as a television show, because Frank had an idea that this would work on TV but this was very early on and nobody (in broadcasting) wanted to see these crazy edits that he was doing so there was a lot of resistance. So the concert, in different forms, ended up on USA Network and on MTV but Frank’s version which he created as a television special, was one particular thing that he put together himself. So my obligation, I feel, to the audience is to put out first what Frank created and then I can go back and take all of that footage, which we intended to do and are in the process of working on, and remix it in surround and put out the whole of the concert series in a big package down the road. But first, you have to see what Frank’s intention was and then you can go back to other opportunities where you can have your way with the material.

Mike: You released the MOFO Project/Object in 2006, and put in the names of anyone who pre-ordered the record into the liner notes of the release. I talk a lot about the importance of artists’ personalizing packages for their fans for direct sales off of their web site, as it helps to build the artist/fan connection. Was that part of the idea with MOFO? How did you come up with it in the first place?

Gail: We had actually done that as an experiment, when we put out our first concert release. I wasn’t sure how the audience would respond and it was FZ:OZ and we put everybody’s name on that, who ordered it in advance, because I wasn’t sure if we were going to be able to make it happen. So the pre-orders gave us an opportunity to see that we could actually manufacture the way we wanted to. I have always felt very strongly about the packaging; I always have. That started with Frank, so even in the face of economic disaster in the industry and digital downloads, I still believe in the physical package. So we had already done that, but the main inspiration for adding people’s names into MOFO, the special edition, was because Frank had listed the names of people who helped to influence that music, in Freak Out. So I felt that for the people, for whom the music exists, and they are going to support it early in, you can have your name and your credit on this too because you deserve it! It wasn’t anything to do, really, with being interactive on the site.

Mike: I know that you area selling a few digital releases of Frank’s music off of your own site, and that there is very little available on iTunes. Is that because you feel strongly about the packaging? Can you talk a little bit about why a lot of Frank’s music isn’t on third-party digital sites?

Gail: Ok, this is a very big answer to what seems to be a pretty straightforward question. First of all, what the studio audience doesn’t know and what’s behind the curtain, is that there is a lawsuit where certain parties are claiming many rights, digital rights being among them. I can tell you, absolutely, that it was never Frank Zappa’s intention that anyone would control the digital rights of his music other than his heirs, so its not anything he ever told me to sell. The fact of the matter is he published a paper on how music would be delivered in the future in 1983 and copyrighted it and just bemoaned the fact that he didn’t have the budget to hire programmers to make that happen. So he was way out there and he certainly knew. Although the term “digital rights”, at the time of his death and the time of the sale, didn’t exist, that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t thinking about them and planning ahead for what would best serve the value of the copyrights that remained with me. So he was thinking about his family at the time and he wanted to protect those rights. That’s part A. Part B is that I am not a fan of iTunes. I am not a fan of their growth through their overbearing means by which they have a reduced value of music. First, they taught everyone how to steal it and then they said,” Oops, sorry here’s how you can pay for it really cheap!” So you know, I’m not a fan of that and I’m not a fan of price-fixing, which is something they do. You don’t have a lot of choice in what you can offer and how you can offer it. I mean they just have rules and I understand that it is probably just a by-product of some of their programming issues but there should be other choices. I believe that the future is that there will be other choices and they will be on every artists own fan site or a conglomerate consortium of artists’ fan sites that’s not controlled by an outside party that does not respect artist’s rights. The part C of this answer, is that up until fairly recently and even still today, the sounds are massively compressed, they are not the way the artist intended them to be presented to an audience for an audiophile experience. So there was a reason for me to engage in that. Now I don’t care so much about Beat the Boots on iTunes because that’s not a recording made by Frank Zappa. Those are bootlegs as opposed to counterfeits.

Mike: I know that the releases you are selling off of Zappa.com are at a higher bit rate. Can you envision down the line that you would be releasing some of Frank’s catalog at lossless quality off of Zappa.com?

Gail: Yes

Mike: How are you working to expose new listeners to Frank’s music? If a lot of Frank’s catalog is unavailable digitally, and physical retail is cutting back with their inventory, what other ways are you working to expose potential fans to Frank’s music?

Gail: In an ideal situation, I would be able to have more participation in the original catalog than I do right now, and that may yet happen in the next few months. If it does, then you will see a very big change. For me, any kind of release that we get out there helps to sell everything. I mean, people think I’ve planned, perhaps with Dweezil, how to do this and Dweezil has certainly contributed to introducing music to a younger audience, for the most part, so that already exists. I get letters from people that are fourteen or under all the time that are interested in the music. The problem is, is that you are fighting a huge battle. It’s great that Dweezil is out there performing the music because the saddest part is that he comes closest to having produced the band that I think Frank would’ve actually hired himself, including Dweezil on “stunt guitar”. That would have been ideal, but there’s nothing else out there that touches that band, in terms of Dweezil’s intention with respect to what he is trying to accomplish with musicians of that caliber.

Mike: I saw them two years back in Boston with Steve Vai and they were just great…

Gail: Yeah, but that was back when everyone believed that you had to have former members of the band. With all due respect, you know, we love Steve Vai – but here’s a disappointment that I have to say fairly regularly, and that is that Frank’s agenda was to educate because when you educate the audience, you give them the opportunity to experience a wide variety of musical entertainment. Now I can’t do that as well as Frank because I’m not in a band. I mean, on stage, he would introduce Stravinsky, Varèse, and Bartok, you know, all sorts of composers and lots of R&B music that he loved when he was a kid and he went out of his way to make sure people heard those sounds and heard that music. It wasn’t so important from them to know who the composer was until he did interviews; you don’t have to announce it on stage because then people don’t really pay attention. The fact is that their ears are being trained; I can’t do the ear training that Frank did but I can constantly reinforce the idea that there is a basis; there is a history behind all of this stuff. It’s based in intention; the composer’s intent is everything. So you can’t just have somebody interpret Frank’s music because in many cases it’s no different than identity theft or character assassination. When people just take it into their own hands and arrange it without getting permission and do terrible things to it that were never intended – because for them it’s easier to play that way. So I feel that I have a really strong contract with Frank Zappa to get that music out there the way that he intended it and that’s the other part of how the releases work.
But, getting back to the disappointing aspect. For me it is that there are all these people that worked under Frank’s baton and not one of them does covers. You know, you would think that somebody would think it’d be a great idea to do a cover version. I’d love to license Frank’s music but it’s just so inappropriate to license classics in so many ways because they were never written or intended for, especially not those performances, they were never intended for commercial exploitation. If people did covers though, I could certainly consider licensing those if they were something that I thought was sincere and represented the intent of the composer.

Mike: Could you give me an example of something that you would be interested in licensing?

Gail: Well, for example, I get a billion requests for “Willy the Pimp,” but there is no way that I am going to let that go out there unless I had some other version because I don’t think that it is right to exploit Frank’s particular statement and that actual recording. I mean a lot of these records were made back in the day, where these studios themselves were instruments in the hands of the composer and that’s no longer true. Everybody works out of a box now that you plug in. Back in the day, the studio was one of the actual instruments and controlling what you could do in a studio gave you as many opportunities in terms of the sounds that you could get as any other instrument. So a studio in the hands of a skilled composer is a whole other animal.

Mike: I read an interview you did where you had this great quote, “my job is to make sure that Frank Zappa has the last word in terms of anybody’s idea of who he is and his actual last word is his music.” What does that mean in terms of your opinion of copyright as it relates to Frank Zappa?

Gail: Well, I think that every person who creates anything in the realm of intellectual property is protected under the Constitution of the United States of America, because that’s what copyright law is. I didn’t invent it. I’m not the bad (or good) guy that said this is how it’s supposed to go. There’s a reason for copyrights to exist because they actually are proof and a working version of the ideas of those people, at this time and this place and I like that idea. The more freedom there is to express these ideas, the better off we all are and that’s the reason why I also love and enjoy the Bill of Rights. However, when you consider the means by which other people are trying to take copyright law and try to take it apart at the seams, they’re doing it by misinformation. It’s disinformation basically. If you want to start a war and pretend that somebody took the first shot, you use disinformation as we’ve seen in the past, to make that happen. This is war against artist rights and I think that it is not a very good idea, in this day and age, to introduce any kind of arts programming, in terms of educational programs, without introducing also the means by which you protect your rights. It’s no different than a signature at the end of the day. It’s like this, if somebody is a Muslim or a Christian, do they have the right to make you be one by voting, by majority vote? No, that’s clearly not the American way and it’s the same with copyrights. If you want to give your music away for free, that doesn’t mean you get to join a group that’s going to take apart everyone else’s rights just because that’s what you believe. You have a choice. Go ahead. Give it away. If you think that that’s the best way to market your music, by never being able to earn a living from doing that, great. Join that fabulous club and enjoy.

Mike: Any other thoughts on the state of the music industry, and ideas on how to move ahead as an artist?

Gail: Mostly, the business of music these days is a popularity contest and it’s the ability of some performer, primarily, to capture the attention of an audience and expand on that. I think as a musician/composer, you can’t look at that as competition. I mean this industry was bound to implode on itself because it’s like any other. Once the distributors are more famous than any artists they distribute, you’ve got a problem because there’s a lot of money going in to support that structure that shouldn’t be in their pockets. You know, its like if an agency is more famous that the actors it represents, in the public’s mind, you can see how that’s a problem. Well that’s what happened to the record companies too, in many ways. The real issue for artists to consider is there are so many times where decisions are being made about your rights and people who are not even including you in the conversation are taking them away from you. A perfect example of that are record ratings. The RIAA bent over and gave away rights that belong to the artists because they wanted their special pay tax bill. We’re about to put out a release so you’ll see that, Frank’s testimony on the issue, but it’s a perfect example of the fact that artist’s aren’t at the table; they aren’t represented. So I would say to any artist that wants to make a living on what he does, the first thing is: don’t stop doing what you are doing. The second rule is keep on doing it. The third rule is get a very long-range plan and stick to it. You’ve got to use the force of your imagination harnessing the force of your will and once you put the two of those things together and you have a clear picture of what it is that your trying to do as an artist, it doesn’t matter how you change your path in terms of how you accomplish your goals but you just have to keep on doing it and don’t let anybody get in your way by telling you that your work is not valuable. Invest in yourself even if no one else does, because that is the only way that you are going to survive. You’ll find ways; first of all, there is no competition for what you do. Absolutely none, anywhere. It is hard to get peoples’ attention but it happens if you work at it! If you do nothing, it won’t happen. That’s for damn sure!