So how DO you make it as an artist in this world?
I'm not sure I can tell you anything beyond what you probably already know. You have to have superb songs, produced just right and you have to present yourself as an attractive (not necessarily "pretty") package. That's step one.
Then, you need to perform live and showcase your music in any way you can think of, premier among these outlets being your local radio - and other radio if you can get to it (tough one, I know!).
Next, you need to be in a community, be it your local musicians, music and media people or an online group. You need to be active, friendly and supportive of everyone you meet.
Furthermore, you need to invest some funds into your own promotion, be it newsletters, press releases, posters or merchandise - and ensure you start actively building your fan club. When you have an active database of a few thousand fans and you can pack a local venue, you need to start inviting the "right" music business people to come and check you out. And by that time you already need to be friends with music lawyers, A&R men and other artists. And, finally, you need a little bit of luck at each step of the way.
But most importantly, you need endless perseverance. That's not as hard as you might think, if you actually LOVE what you're doing. You'll need to secure some financial backup, of course (and that might be a night job somewhere), but if you persevere and never get daunted by setbacks, delays and critiques (all of which makes you better and stronger!), you will increase your chances tremendously.
But among all those do's and dont's the one thing that will ALWAYS stand out is THE SONG.
If you can write a GREAT song, you'll shortcut the above process by a factor of 1000. And THAT is why it's so important to write songs that are REAL and unique to YOU. But also structured cleverly enough for them to find a wide audience who understand what you're talking about and want to hear that message again.
Take the time it takes!
Ultimately, what wins out is well-organized TALENT THAT PERSEVERES... who has GREAT, TIMELESS songs!
Make sure you check out my sub-blog "Write a Song About This" - http://writeasongaboutthis.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
The Fallacy That Is A Hit Song
One of the things we do here on Fame Games is try to find a "hit song" among all the independent material submitted to us, and then push that along to our contacts in the industry, in the hope that some of our artists will be rewarded with lucrative deals! Wouldn't that be a perfect proof of concept for Fame Games! (We're now beginning now to slowly fulfill that dream...)
And yet, none of us support those cheesy manufactured "hits" written with only one goal in mind: to make money on a musical format for as long as possible.
We come from varied musical backgrounds. Even though some of us have been quite involved with some very successful artists, producers and managements where having "hits" was certainly never spat on, we are quite unanimous in our agreement that the creation of music must be organically driven and "real" and that contriving your arrangements against your instincts only so that they might have a chance of becoming "commercial hits" is a path of self-destruction - and it harms the public ears!
But we're also open to the reality of life. For an artist to be able to sustain themselves from their art, they need at least a degree of recognition. And this, quite often, means that their music must have "credibility." It must be well executed, it must deliver its message in the best possible way for the target audience it is aimed at, and... it must be a "hit" if it is to get the artist noticed. And for us, to have credibility as an A&R platform we must prove that we can indeed find the "best of the best." And only then will our artists truly stand to benefit from those efforts.
The way we think of a "hit" is a song which "hits you over the head" and makes you remember the particular artist. If you produce, listen to and "consume" music for a living, and in the quantities that we do, you soon develop a sense of what "connects" and what doesn't. Erm... except that we don't always agree. (Which is why we've spent years fine-tuning a system which is supposed to help us in making those decisions...)
When we recognized how futile it is to look for a "hit" song, we dropped that word from our vocabulary for quite a while, until... we got picked up by a major radio network whose affiliates didn't want to play unknown music! For them it's not enough that a song is "good." It's got to be a hit already. No, not "a potential" hit. A bona fide hit.
You can't believe the struggle it was for us to convince our reluctant affiliates that radio CAN help DISCOVER future hits (like it used to). We're still fighting this battle. As we reconize that giving our artists maximum exposure can only be helpful to the vast majority of them, we also recognize that we must meet our affiliates (and especially the undecided affiliates) half-way.
So we started using the slogan "Looking for the next big radio hit!"
What do you think? Does this work? What would you do differently, if anything?
Don't forget to check out my other blog "Write A Song About This!"
And yet, none of us support those cheesy manufactured "hits" written with only one goal in mind: to make money on a musical format for as long as possible.
We come from varied musical backgrounds. Even though some of us have been quite involved with some very successful artists, producers and managements where having "hits" was certainly never spat on, we are quite unanimous in our agreement that the creation of music must be organically driven and "real" and that contriving your arrangements against your instincts only so that they might have a chance of becoming "commercial hits" is a path of self-destruction - and it harms the public ears!
But we're also open to the reality of life. For an artist to be able to sustain themselves from their art, they need at least a degree of recognition. And this, quite often, means that their music must have "credibility." It must be well executed, it must deliver its message in the best possible way for the target audience it is aimed at, and... it must be a "hit" if it is to get the artist noticed. And for us, to have credibility as an A&R platform we must prove that we can indeed find the "best of the best." And only then will our artists truly stand to benefit from those efforts.
The way we think of a "hit" is a song which "hits you over the head" and makes you remember the particular artist. If you produce, listen to and "consume" music for a living, and in the quantities that we do, you soon develop a sense of what "connects" and what doesn't. Erm... except that we don't always agree. (Which is why we've spent years fine-tuning a system which is supposed to help us in making those decisions...)
When we recognized how futile it is to look for a "hit" song, we dropped that word from our vocabulary for quite a while, until... we got picked up by a major radio network whose affiliates didn't want to play unknown music! For them it's not enough that a song is "good." It's got to be a hit already. No, not "a potential" hit. A bona fide hit.
You can't believe the struggle it was for us to convince our reluctant affiliates that radio CAN help DISCOVER future hits (like it used to). We're still fighting this battle. As we reconize that giving our artists maximum exposure can only be helpful to the vast majority of them, we also recognize that we must meet our affiliates (and especially the undecided affiliates) half-way.
So we started using the slogan "Looking for the next big radio hit!"
What do you think? Does this work? What would you do differently, if anything?
Don't forget to check out my other blog "Write A Song About This!"
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Swimming Against The Tide
The world of corporate music and radio is a frustrating one. For one thing, it's got absolutely nothing to do with "music" or "radio." It's all about the bottom line, supporting data, and business drivers.
If you're an idealist who just wants the world to be a better place, you're gonna have a little problem. For the world to hear you and graciously accept your message, you'll need the largest platform you can find. But when you finally find it, you'll discover that nobody wants to support you if your vision breaks any of the established paradigms. As if it wasn't hard enough already!
There are two main ways of having it your way.
Neither is guaranteed to work. In fact, both are nearly guaranteed to fail, but it's all we've got. The first way is to simply do what you do and disregard the opposition. If your goal and message are powerful enough, then enough people will get behind you and your music or ideas will eventually sweep the world and it will become a better place at long last. The second way is slightly more underhanded. You blend in with the establishment, establish yourself more and more, and when you're ready you start executing your noble agenda - eroding the system from within and the world becomes a better place at long last.
The trouble with the first method is that I can't at the moment think of anyone who's actually succeeded in it and is around to tell the tale. The trouble with the second method is that before you start breaking the rules, the system corrupts you and you become "one of them." For example, did you know that Alan Greenspan was an outspoken critic of the Fed and an ardent supporter of the gold standard? Until he joined them.
Perhaps we have something to learn from the spy business. And from Sun Tzu's Art of War . Or Machiavelli's. Double agents have infiltrated governments and organizations and have successfully managed to bolster the interests of their "base" (until they got caught). Couldn't we all become agents for change? Only trouble is... "change" without a precise definition can be pretty problematic. There has to be a definition of what "change" is "supposed to" mean. Perhaps it's best then if I finish by quoting Sun Tzu: "So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a thousand battles without a single loss."
What does all this have to do with music or radio? The sooner you find out, the sooner you can become part of the solution, and help move your dreams that much closer to reality.
Also check out my other blog Write A Song About This.
If you're an idealist who just wants the world to be a better place, you're gonna have a little problem. For the world to hear you and graciously accept your message, you'll need the largest platform you can find. But when you finally find it, you'll discover that nobody wants to support you if your vision breaks any of the established paradigms. As if it wasn't hard enough already!
There are two main ways of having it your way.
Neither is guaranteed to work. In fact, both are nearly guaranteed to fail, but it's all we've got. The first way is to simply do what you do and disregard the opposition. If your goal and message are powerful enough, then enough people will get behind you and your music or ideas will eventually sweep the world and it will become a better place at long last. The second way is slightly more underhanded. You blend in with the establishment, establish yourself more and more, and when you're ready you start executing your noble agenda - eroding the system from within and the world becomes a better place at long last.
The trouble with the first method is that I can't at the moment think of anyone who's actually succeeded in it and is around to tell the tale. The trouble with the second method is that before you start breaking the rules, the system corrupts you and you become "one of them." For example, did you know that Alan Greenspan was an outspoken critic of the Fed and an ardent supporter of the gold standard? Until he joined them.
- Joining the elite in order to introduce change is a near-certain recipe for losing touch with your base.
- Going it alone is a near-certain recipe for alienating your base - because you're the lone nut after all!
Perhaps we have something to learn from the spy business. And from Sun Tzu's Art of War . Or Machiavelli's. Double agents have infiltrated governments and organizations and have successfully managed to bolster the interests of their "base" (until they got caught). Couldn't we all become agents for change? Only trouble is... "change" without a precise definition can be pretty problematic. There has to be a definition of what "change" is "supposed to" mean. Perhaps it's best then if I finish by quoting Sun Tzu: "So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a thousand battles without a single loss."
What does all this have to do with music or radio? The sooner you find out, the sooner you can become part of the solution, and help move your dreams that much closer to reality.
Also check out my other blog Write A Song About This.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Check Out My New Sub-Blog
At DJ Crier's insistence (but otherwise quite willingly), I've started a different kind of blog. It deals with everything BUT music - and yet, it's all about looking for inspiration for writing songs...!
Check it out right HERE. And then... write a song about this!
Check it out right HERE. And then... write a song about this!
Saturday, September 5, 2009
If The People Lead - The Leaders Will Follow
A batallion of soldiers, all dug into their trenches, finding a measure of comfort in their relative safety. Now, here you are, another soldier just like them, but you notice something nobody else did. You notice that they’ve dug their trenches on the wrong side of the battlefield! So you call out to them. A bit late now, granted, but better late than never, you think. "Dudes! We gotta get outta there and dig them trenches right here where I am, okay? We're dug in the wrong place!"
One or two soldiers get up, look around and sure enough they see you're right. "Yeah, he's right" they say, but as they hear others grumble, they quickly sit down. "Who the hell are you to be ordering us around?" says one. "We were told to dig here and we're gonna stay here until we hear different!" says another. "You don't know what you're talking about man. If you were right, they wouldn't have made us dig here!" he adds. Pretty soon, other voices join in. Most of them hate the thought of digging new trenches or disobeying orders - and what if you're wrong? (although all they'd need to do to confirm you're right is just get up and look around).
Before long, you're hearing something different. This time it's about you... "What kind of a soldier are you, dude!" "He's a coward, that's what he is!" "He don't know nothin' about nothin'!" "He's trying to get us to move cuz he's an enemy plant!" “Nut!” "Traitor!"
If you can picture this, you will probably not fail to notice how similar this is to just about everything in life. You name it. Politics. Science. Archeology. Medicine. Business. Sports. Music. Name it.
That's the problem with being "alternative."
You're always an outsider. And you always have to deal with "entrenched" people. People who for reasons of their own have convinced themselves that their hole in the ground is the right place to be (even while they complain about how uncomfortable it is!). And it doesn't matter in the least whether you're right or wrong. Unless you're their general, chances are you'll never make them budge.
So what do you do?
If your opinion is important enough to you, you continue pushing your point. But all too often you'll be derided, ridiculed - or worse. If you're the lone dissenter, you're just "a nut" and they'll neutralize, punish or otherwise remove you from their sight. Nobody likes a trouble-maker.
So you start rallying people together. Pretty soon, you have a whole group of like-minded folks behind you, but… you soon realize that no matter how many support you, you're all still in the minority, and no change ever really happens. Not fast enough, that’s for sure.
Anyhow, you were persistent and you now have a bunch of other soldiers who think you're right. They too want to make a change. All of you are now beginning to talk to all the others, trying to convince them that change is necessary and it's time to move to the other side of the field. Grudgingly, many get almost-almost convinced, but they're still just sitting there, thinking about it.
Suddenly, another soldier gets up. Unlike you, he's powerful looking, full of charisma, outspoken. "People," he says. "Jim here is right. There IS something wrong with them trenches here! We need to change this situation! It's up to us! It's our lives, people! We need change!" You look around and to your amazement you see that most of the soldiers are beginning to stir. They're listening. "What do you mean dude?" asks one. "How do you see it?" "What do you think we should do?" "What kind of change, man?"
The charismatic leader looks around and starts painting a vision of how this change should be accomplished. "It's simple people. We need real change. Not chasing into the unknown, to the other side of the field...! We just need to dig a little deeper, see?" The soldiers are impressed. "How much deeper?" "A few inches deeper at least," says their new leader.
And you know what? They all agreed, and opted for this brand of change: don't change your position. Just dig deeper. Get more entrenched...!
I'm not sure if my slightly strained analogy works, but I'm guessing you can probably see where I'm going with this.
So how does this pertain to music, you may ask? What does this have to do with me as an artist, or as a listener? And what does it have to do with a program like Fame Games?
I'm so glad you asked that.
Turn on your radio. What do you hear? Is it crap? Mostly, yes. Switch the station. Same thing? Yeah. So you talk to others and soon you discover that almost nobody you know likes the radio all that much any more. How can that be? Radio used to be the bomb. Times have changed. But you like radio. You just don't like what they're playing! So you want to change it. You ask all your friends to call their local station and ask for something new. "How's about we ask our station to play some new music for a change?" But your pleas fall on deaf ears. Nobody cares enough to make that call. And so it's business as usual and the music just keeps on getting worse. Maybe it’s just you getting old….
So you turn to the Internet. It doesn't take very long to discover that you can easily find more of the same stuff you hear on the radio. But you can also hear loads of new music. Hurrah! Only trouble is that the vast majority of what all these music sites offer is not that great, not really well filtered or selected for lasting values and quality. It's mostly crap too, just different kind of crap. Hey, now you're beginning to realize what radio was supposed to be in the first place: they're supposed to filter stuff for you and help you discover new music. Kinda like reporters who tell you what's going on in the news. Ideally, without prejudice. You now wish there was something out there that would do that. You eventually find one or two local stations somewhere a few states away, but you wish the whole nation could be listening to this... So you call out for people to do something about it.
It's not happening.
And it's even worse if you're not just a listener, but also an artist, hoping to get your music out there, maybe even have a career, because you have a god-given talent and you worked real hard to get to where you are.
You very quickly discover that the music business paradigm doesn't like to change, be it radio or records. Sure, the Internet has forced it to change quite a bit. But not nearly as much as you're being lead to believe. It's all just surface stuff. You still need promotion, right? You still need deals - or if you wanna be independent, you'd still need your own money to pay your production and promotional costs, correct? Internet makes a lot of things way cheaper and easier, for sure, but the overall picture didn't change nearly as much as we'd all like. On top of it all the web is so tremendously crowded and the only way to break through is just like in the real world - with money (all the claims of "viral" marketing notwithstanding)...!
We got into radio by accident.
We're musicians just like all of our Fame Games artists and music lovers like all of our listeners. But along the way we got to be quite well “connected” and at some point we thought that this would make things easier for us. It didn't. Years later, in spite of many "great" names we could brag about that we've worked with, our artistic careers didn't move forward nearly enough. Eventually, we dropped the idea of looking for "deals" and we started trying to do it all independently. We started looking for independent distribution and promotion. Internet was the new thing, right? And that's where our eyes started opening.
Talk about entrenched opposition.
Whether you're talking terrestrial radio or Internet-based, the name of the promotional game is... getting a LOT of plays. Getting the so-called "rotational airplay" (i.e. the meaningful kind of airplay as opposed to a one-off somewhere) proved to be impossible. Or, I should say, not "impossible" but "impossibly expensive." If you're like we were back then, you probably think that Billboard hits get there because somebody thinks they're just great songs... Erm... Right.
Check this out: we've cross-referenced this with many consultants and companies. If you want to reach Billboard Top-100, and I mean just touch the bottom of the chart and not even dream of a #1 - you're not looking at anything less than $250k in initial costs. For real...! And the thing is that if you were to do this yourself, you'd still be at least $150k in the hole (but actually more because your time and travel, plugging to all the stations, promotions, representation, sustenance... all that would add up). And all that just to convince program directors ("PD's") to include your song in their playlists. And I'm not even gonna look at the (prevalent) scenario where most large stations won't even talk to you if you're not with a label, no matter how good your music is...
So once you find yourself armed with this all-too-real knowledge, you start yelling: "people, this has got to change. It's a rigged game!"
But hardly anyone listens...
So we founded Fame Games. A radio show with a catchy name that was gonna change all that by banding everybody together. We started out small. How else! We initially aired to a relatively large expatriate community in the South of Spain. This is one of the world's most popular tourist places, where 10 to 15 million mostly English-speaking tourists flock every year and all the Hollywood stars have their summer homes here. And many stay here for good (like us!) because you just can't beat this weather and the relaxed atmosphere and a sense of "freedom." So we had a good start. But… no real interest. To break through we had to aim for a larger market.
So, we decided that strength in numbers was the way to go. As soon as we announced Fame Games on the web the word of mouth started spreading. The show was soon inundated with artists wanting free airtime. Some of them were awesomely good but even so they didn't have record deals nor anywhere else to go...!
And so we decided to really elevate this show. If we wanted to have a chance in hell of succeeding, we had to get good. We started scripting, fine-tuning the show, rebuilding our site, strategizing, thinking out of the box... And slowly but surely the show kept improving (according to some anyway, lol) and after a few years of patiently building this thing, and nearly four million visits later, we managed to come to the attention of ABC Radio Networks.
For a while we thought we had it made. Syndication at last...! That's kinda like a record deal for an artist. Yeah...!
Not so fast.
Before we knew it, the radio world started looking eerily like the record world. We were "IN" - but only superficially... When affiliate stations looked at this program they would come up with ANY excuse not to take it. And the coinciding global crisis didn't help either.
Here are just some of the things they'd say after the initial "what a great idea for launching new music, we love this show...!" We heard stuff like: "It's great but not for our market, not for our station. You guys play too much music." Or "great show, but there's too much talk here and too many styles." Or how about these few quotes: "Too much hip-hop," "Too much rock," "Too much country," "Too much pop," "You guys play FOLK??" "The show is too British for American ears," (and the British affiliates would retort "The show is way too American for the Brits" And so on and on....! Until you hit the NUMBER ONE most often cited reason for why your local radio station doesn't want to play Fame Games: "Nobody knows this music!"
Excuse me! Isn't that the whole point? It will never become known if affiliates are afraid to carry it! And how does music become known anyway?
So, we continued tweaking and improving the format, trying to address everyone's concerns, but the affiliate objections didn't change. Pretty soon, we knew that there had to be more to this than met the eye. After a year with a major network we thought we'd be nationwide by now because NOBODY else is doing this on network radio, and just about everybody we ask says they’d LOVE TO listen to radio if something like this was on…! Instead, we only got picked up by a few dozen stations. If that! What is wrong with those people? Is it us? Is the format so unappealing? Is the music not good enough?
We were asking ourselves the exact same questions that all artists ask themselves when facing rejection after rejection. We were dealing with “entrenched mentalities” of program directors whose only job, it seemed, was to come up with reasons why they shouldn't change. They just "dug deeper!" And when we'd tune in to their stations we wouldn’t be able to tell one apart from the other.
They all sound the same! They all carry the SAME (major label) songs (rotated every 60 to 90 minutes), and all have the same uninspiring, tired old format. But THAT is what the PD's want in spite of the fact that the listeners are telling a different story altogether...! And then they wonder why radio is going down the tubes…! They're just like most record companies and their A&R men! They're just like... all entrenched individuals in this world...
Are we crazy? Or is everyone else mad?
Carl Jung once said "the foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering." So we knew we had to get through this somehow. It would make us stronger. We knew that our challenge is to survive and persevere - and come up with an intelligent plan. Nothing good is ever easy. It doesn't matter that there are MILLIONS of artists, a small part of whom we already represent, who WANT THIS. It doesn't matter that the PEOPLE really WANT something NEW on radio - and higher quality music selection on the Internet music sites for that matter too. What matters is that we haven't found the right strategy to overcome our opposition. And we had to find it or die.
As an artist, way back when, I looked to collaborations to improve my writing and producing skills, as well as networking to enhance my ability to pitch. So we now knew that we'd have to try something similar here as well.
And so we expanded our collaborations and partnerships (even managed to enlist a bona fide celebrity or two to help us push this concept), and we continued improving the show's content, tweaking the site and... burning money at an alarming rate. Just like a serious independent artist who's trying to run his career like a business, we knew that we had to find funding and incomes fast. Either that - or we'd have to pack it in, and the dream would die along with us.
Much easier said than done. You go out looking for support and as soon as you've "sold" them on your idea and just when you think they'll hand over some cash, you hear them talking about how everything that's most fundamental to you should be changed. "Let's commercialize this much more. Just play pop, okay?" or "Let's play major label music at least 50% of the time," or "Let's hire some professional DJs and programmers to make this more compatible with the rest of the US radio..."
Sometimes, even when you REALLY don't want to, you just have to say NO.
We faced many of those devil's alternatives... Sell out or perish. When you're up against the wall, the hungrier you get the more selling out seems like a pretty good way to go... Until you pinch yourself real hard and realize that by compromising your CORE VALUES you lose your EDGE and that all-important differential factor which is why they got interested in you in the first place!
And there's another analogy there. As an artist you're constantly told what to change and what to improve. The ability to distinguish between the technical and content issues is very important at that point. You should always be open to technical improvements. But be careful how far you bend when it comes to the core values of what you do. If you're too flexible, your music will soon sound like everybody else's - and they already have a lot of that! So, never forget who you are and who you WISH to always remain.
This applies to everything. But especially to artists. And forward-thinking radio shows too....
So what's all this rant really about?
I'll write some more about all that in my upcoming posts. We're starting a new phase here on Fame Games now. Season 5 with ABC/Citadel. We've introduced loads of changes and it looks like we've even managed to convince a major label or two to partner with us (without selling out!) and maybe, just maybe, a few major super-stations to affiliate with us.
We want YOU to succeed along with us, and prove our concept!
But we need and will continue needing support from everybody who's come to us here. Whether you're already a successful Fame Games artist, or whether your efforts on this show have (so far) been frustrated. Don't worry about that. Your time will come if you keep persevering. But in the meantime, reach out and help us change this whole business!
Help spread the word.
Get people to listen to the show and sign up as fans and/or artists. Call your local station many times and ask why the hell do they keep playing all that boring music when the real action is right here on this show? ABC says their affiliates resist the show because there's too much unknown music here! Challenge them on that! Because it’s not really “them…” It’s all up to “you” and ALL OF US.
The world is controlled by those who show up!
One or two soldiers get up, look around and sure enough they see you're right. "Yeah, he's right" they say, but as they hear others grumble, they quickly sit down. "Who the hell are you to be ordering us around?" says one. "We were told to dig here and we're gonna stay here until we hear different!" says another. "You don't know what you're talking about man. If you were right, they wouldn't have made us dig here!" he adds. Pretty soon, other voices join in. Most of them hate the thought of digging new trenches or disobeying orders - and what if you're wrong? (although all they'd need to do to confirm you're right is just get up and look around).
Before long, you're hearing something different. This time it's about you... "What kind of a soldier are you, dude!" "He's a coward, that's what he is!" "He don't know nothin' about nothin'!" "He's trying to get us to move cuz he's an enemy plant!" “Nut!” "Traitor!"
If you can picture this, you will probably not fail to notice how similar this is to just about everything in life. You name it. Politics. Science. Archeology. Medicine. Business. Sports. Music. Name it.
That's the problem with being "alternative."
You're always an outsider. And you always have to deal with "entrenched" people. People who for reasons of their own have convinced themselves that their hole in the ground is the right place to be (even while they complain about how uncomfortable it is!). And it doesn't matter in the least whether you're right or wrong. Unless you're their general, chances are you'll never make them budge.
So what do you do?
If your opinion is important enough to you, you continue pushing your point. But all too often you'll be derided, ridiculed - or worse. If you're the lone dissenter, you're just "a nut" and they'll neutralize, punish or otherwise remove you from their sight. Nobody likes a trouble-maker.
So you start rallying people together. Pretty soon, you have a whole group of like-minded folks behind you, but… you soon realize that no matter how many support you, you're all still in the minority, and no change ever really happens. Not fast enough, that’s for sure.
Anyhow, you were persistent and you now have a bunch of other soldiers who think you're right. They too want to make a change. All of you are now beginning to talk to all the others, trying to convince them that change is necessary and it's time to move to the other side of the field. Grudgingly, many get almost-almost convinced, but they're still just sitting there, thinking about it.
Suddenly, another soldier gets up. Unlike you, he's powerful looking, full of charisma, outspoken. "People," he says. "Jim here is right. There IS something wrong with them trenches here! We need to change this situation! It's up to us! It's our lives, people! We need change!" You look around and to your amazement you see that most of the soldiers are beginning to stir. They're listening. "What do you mean dude?" asks one. "How do you see it?" "What do you think we should do?" "What kind of change, man?"
The charismatic leader looks around and starts painting a vision of how this change should be accomplished. "It's simple people. We need real change. Not chasing into the unknown, to the other side of the field...! We just need to dig a little deeper, see?" The soldiers are impressed. "How much deeper?" "A few inches deeper at least," says their new leader.
And you know what? They all agreed, and opted for this brand of change: don't change your position. Just dig deeper. Get more entrenched...!
I'm not sure if my slightly strained analogy works, but I'm guessing you can probably see where I'm going with this.
So how does this pertain to music, you may ask? What does this have to do with me as an artist, or as a listener? And what does it have to do with a program like Fame Games?
I'm so glad you asked that.
Turn on your radio. What do you hear? Is it crap? Mostly, yes. Switch the station. Same thing? Yeah. So you talk to others and soon you discover that almost nobody you know likes the radio all that much any more. How can that be? Radio used to be the bomb. Times have changed. But you like radio. You just don't like what they're playing! So you want to change it. You ask all your friends to call their local station and ask for something new. "How's about we ask our station to play some new music for a change?" But your pleas fall on deaf ears. Nobody cares enough to make that call. And so it's business as usual and the music just keeps on getting worse. Maybe it’s just you getting old….
So you turn to the Internet. It doesn't take very long to discover that you can easily find more of the same stuff you hear on the radio. But you can also hear loads of new music. Hurrah! Only trouble is that the vast majority of what all these music sites offer is not that great, not really well filtered or selected for lasting values and quality. It's mostly crap too, just different kind of crap. Hey, now you're beginning to realize what radio was supposed to be in the first place: they're supposed to filter stuff for you and help you discover new music. Kinda like reporters who tell you what's going on in the news. Ideally, without prejudice. You now wish there was something out there that would do that. You eventually find one or two local stations somewhere a few states away, but you wish the whole nation could be listening to this... So you call out for people to do something about it.
It's not happening.
And it's even worse if you're not just a listener, but also an artist, hoping to get your music out there, maybe even have a career, because you have a god-given talent and you worked real hard to get to where you are.
You very quickly discover that the music business paradigm doesn't like to change, be it radio or records. Sure, the Internet has forced it to change quite a bit. But not nearly as much as you're being lead to believe. It's all just surface stuff. You still need promotion, right? You still need deals - or if you wanna be independent, you'd still need your own money to pay your production and promotional costs, correct? Internet makes a lot of things way cheaper and easier, for sure, but the overall picture didn't change nearly as much as we'd all like. On top of it all the web is so tremendously crowded and the only way to break through is just like in the real world - with money (all the claims of "viral" marketing notwithstanding)...!
We got into radio by accident.
We're musicians just like all of our Fame Games artists and music lovers like all of our listeners. But along the way we got to be quite well “connected” and at some point we thought that this would make things easier for us. It didn't. Years later, in spite of many "great" names we could brag about that we've worked with, our artistic careers didn't move forward nearly enough. Eventually, we dropped the idea of looking for "deals" and we started trying to do it all independently. We started looking for independent distribution and promotion. Internet was the new thing, right? And that's where our eyes started opening.
Talk about entrenched opposition.
Whether you're talking terrestrial radio or Internet-based, the name of the promotional game is... getting a LOT of plays. Getting the so-called "rotational airplay" (i.e. the meaningful kind of airplay as opposed to a one-off somewhere) proved to be impossible. Or, I should say, not "impossible" but "impossibly expensive." If you're like we were back then, you probably think that Billboard hits get there because somebody thinks they're just great songs... Erm... Right.
Check this out: we've cross-referenced this with many consultants and companies. If you want to reach Billboard Top-100, and I mean just touch the bottom of the chart and not even dream of a #1 - you're not looking at anything less than $250k in initial costs. For real...! And the thing is that if you were to do this yourself, you'd still be at least $150k in the hole (but actually more because your time and travel, plugging to all the stations, promotions, representation, sustenance... all that would add up). And all that just to convince program directors ("PD's") to include your song in their playlists. And I'm not even gonna look at the (prevalent) scenario where most large stations won't even talk to you if you're not with a label, no matter how good your music is...
So once you find yourself armed with this all-too-real knowledge, you start yelling: "people, this has got to change. It's a rigged game!"
But hardly anyone listens...
So we founded Fame Games. A radio show with a catchy name that was gonna change all that by banding everybody together. We started out small. How else! We initially aired to a relatively large expatriate community in the South of Spain. This is one of the world's most popular tourist places, where 10 to 15 million mostly English-speaking tourists flock every year and all the Hollywood stars have their summer homes here. And many stay here for good (like us!) because you just can't beat this weather and the relaxed atmosphere and a sense of "freedom." So we had a good start. But… no real interest. To break through we had to aim for a larger market.
So, we decided that strength in numbers was the way to go. As soon as we announced Fame Games on the web the word of mouth started spreading. The show was soon inundated with artists wanting free airtime. Some of them were awesomely good but even so they didn't have record deals nor anywhere else to go...!
And so we decided to really elevate this show. If we wanted to have a chance in hell of succeeding, we had to get good. We started scripting, fine-tuning the show, rebuilding our site, strategizing, thinking out of the box... And slowly but surely the show kept improving (according to some anyway, lol) and after a few years of patiently building this thing, and nearly four million visits later, we managed to come to the attention of ABC Radio Networks.
For a while we thought we had it made. Syndication at last...! That's kinda like a record deal for an artist. Yeah...!
Not so fast.
Before we knew it, the radio world started looking eerily like the record world. We were "IN" - but only superficially... When affiliate stations looked at this program they would come up with ANY excuse not to take it. And the coinciding global crisis didn't help either.
Here are just some of the things they'd say after the initial "what a great idea for launching new music, we love this show...!" We heard stuff like: "It's great but not for our market, not for our station. You guys play too much music." Or "great show, but there's too much talk here and too many styles." Or how about these few quotes: "Too much hip-hop," "Too much rock," "Too much country," "Too much pop," "You guys play FOLK??" "The show is too British for American ears," (and the British affiliates would retort "The show is way too American for the Brits" And so on and on....! Until you hit the NUMBER ONE most often cited reason for why your local radio station doesn't want to play Fame Games: "Nobody knows this music!"
Excuse me! Isn't that the whole point? It will never become known if affiliates are afraid to carry it! And how does music become known anyway?
So, we continued tweaking and improving the format, trying to address everyone's concerns, but the affiliate objections didn't change. Pretty soon, we knew that there had to be more to this than met the eye. After a year with a major network we thought we'd be nationwide by now because NOBODY else is doing this on network radio, and just about everybody we ask says they’d LOVE TO listen to radio if something like this was on…! Instead, we only got picked up by a few dozen stations. If that! What is wrong with those people? Is it us? Is the format so unappealing? Is the music not good enough?
We were asking ourselves the exact same questions that all artists ask themselves when facing rejection after rejection. We were dealing with “entrenched mentalities” of program directors whose only job, it seemed, was to come up with reasons why they shouldn't change. They just "dug deeper!" And when we'd tune in to their stations we wouldn’t be able to tell one apart from the other.
They all sound the same! They all carry the SAME (major label) songs (rotated every 60 to 90 minutes), and all have the same uninspiring, tired old format. But THAT is what the PD's want in spite of the fact that the listeners are telling a different story altogether...! And then they wonder why radio is going down the tubes…! They're just like most record companies and their A&R men! They're just like... all entrenched individuals in this world...
Are we crazy? Or is everyone else mad?
Carl Jung once said "the foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering." So we knew we had to get through this somehow. It would make us stronger. We knew that our challenge is to survive and persevere - and come up with an intelligent plan. Nothing good is ever easy. It doesn't matter that there are MILLIONS of artists, a small part of whom we already represent, who WANT THIS. It doesn't matter that the PEOPLE really WANT something NEW on radio - and higher quality music selection on the Internet music sites for that matter too. What matters is that we haven't found the right strategy to overcome our opposition. And we had to find it or die.
As an artist, way back when, I looked to collaborations to improve my writing and producing skills, as well as networking to enhance my ability to pitch. So we now knew that we'd have to try something similar here as well.
And so we expanded our collaborations and partnerships (even managed to enlist a bona fide celebrity or two to help us push this concept), and we continued improving the show's content, tweaking the site and... burning money at an alarming rate. Just like a serious independent artist who's trying to run his career like a business, we knew that we had to find funding and incomes fast. Either that - or we'd have to pack it in, and the dream would die along with us.
Much easier said than done. You go out looking for support and as soon as you've "sold" them on your idea and just when you think they'll hand over some cash, you hear them talking about how everything that's most fundamental to you should be changed. "Let's commercialize this much more. Just play pop, okay?" or "Let's play major label music at least 50% of the time," or "Let's hire some professional DJs and programmers to make this more compatible with the rest of the US radio..."
Sometimes, even when you REALLY don't want to, you just have to say NO.
We faced many of those devil's alternatives... Sell out or perish. When you're up against the wall, the hungrier you get the more selling out seems like a pretty good way to go... Until you pinch yourself real hard and realize that by compromising your CORE VALUES you lose your EDGE and that all-important differential factor which is why they got interested in you in the first place!
And there's another analogy there. As an artist you're constantly told what to change and what to improve. The ability to distinguish between the technical and content issues is very important at that point. You should always be open to technical improvements. But be careful how far you bend when it comes to the core values of what you do. If you're too flexible, your music will soon sound like everybody else's - and they already have a lot of that! So, never forget who you are and who you WISH to always remain.
This applies to everything. But especially to artists. And forward-thinking radio shows too....
So what's all this rant really about?
I'll write some more about all that in my upcoming posts. We're starting a new phase here on Fame Games now. Season 5 with ABC/Citadel. We've introduced loads of changes and it looks like we've even managed to convince a major label or two to partner with us (without selling out!) and maybe, just maybe, a few major super-stations to affiliate with us.
We want YOU to succeed along with us, and prove our concept!
But we need and will continue needing support from everybody who's come to us here. Whether you're already a successful Fame Games artist, or whether your efforts on this show have (so far) been frustrated. Don't worry about that. Your time will come if you keep persevering. But in the meantime, reach out and help us change this whole business!
Help spread the word.
Get people to listen to the show and sign up as fans and/or artists. Call your local station many times and ask why the hell do they keep playing all that boring music when the real action is right here on this show? ABC says their affiliates resist the show because there's too much unknown music here! Challenge them on that! Because it’s not really “them…” It’s all up to “you” and ALL OF US.
The world is controlled by those who show up!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
