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How I Secured 3 Record Deals In 3 Different Ways For 3 Different Bands [Part 3]

image from www.google.comIn this, the concluding part of the series, the developments of the Internet, social networking, and online video enabled a brand new way of breaking a band and securing a deal. Whereas part 1 examined an old school approach, and part 2 reflected on missed opportunities, part 3 brings the route to getting a deal very much into the present day.

After The Davey Brothers (see part 2) had parted company with Interscope, I was pretty dejected with the record industry. Needing to rethink my career I threw myself into making a movie. It was called The Canary Effect and was a feature documentary about the genocide of Native Americans. It opened at the Tribeca Festival to great reviews and went on to win “The Stanley Kubrick Award For Bold And Innovative Film Making” at Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival. With this newfound success, I was ready to put my music career behind me and turn my focus to film. 

However, my co-director on the movie, a fiery American Indian named Yellow Thunder Woman, was bugging me to start a band with her. Her brothers and sister were in a band called Indigenous. My brother and I had produced their eponymously titled third album, and I had met Yellow Thunder Woman while we were in the studio.

Having just purchased a new Mac to edit the movie on I had yet to install Logic or Protools on it. Browsing through the applications folder I found Garageband and opened it up. To my surprise it seemed like a pretty comprehensive audio program, especially given that it was free. So without much thought we started writing songs using Garageband. Within a week we had completed an album and The Bastard Fairies were born. We started putting up coolly styled photos on our Myspace page, plus a couple of teaser songs from the album, and people were slowly but surely gaining an interest.

With my recent experience of spending 3 years at Interscope without releasing anything, the last thing I felt like doing was searching out distribution for this new release. Then one day while discussing this YTW said, “I don’t want to sell the album, lets give it away for free”, after a moments pause I realized the genius of this idea. With the industry in downfall and nobody willing to take risks signing bands, coupled with the fact we had no overheads, it seemed the obvious way to distribute our album. 

BUILDING MOMENTUM

We already had amassed 10,000 or so fans on Myspace, having been one of the early bands to embrace the new social network. So we wrote a blog saying that we were giving our album away for free with the only stipulation being – if you download it, you have to burn 10 discs and give them away to your friends, and in turn ask them to do the same. It was 2006 and no one had done this before. Giving an entire album away for free was such a new idea people didn’t know what to make of it.

However, it was not until Youtube started taking off that we fully utilized our new method of distribution. Being a filmmaker, making videos was an obvious means of promotion for the band. We didn’t make things flashy, we would get drunk and make stupid music videos with friends, or do acoustic performances using toy pianos and crappy drum machines. We left all the mistakes in and often recorded direct to the laptop. It is strange to think how this had never really been done, but before 2005/06 all this technology and accessibility was pretty much foreign to the majority.

THE TIPPING POINT 

Our videos were getting some pretty good hits, around the 10,000 mark and with it our free downloads were also stacking up. Then one day I was looking at the top played videos on Youtube, and there was one from lonelygirl15. As I remember it was basically a girl in her bedroom talking about mundane things, but she was getting hundreds of thousands of hits.

I thought it would be very interesting if this concept was turned on its head, and a young child was saying very controversial things. So I wrote a script that dissed Bill O’Reilly, Republicans, organized religion, and praised the educational benefits of watching Family Guy – all spoken from the mouth of a cute eight-year-old girl.

The video picked up momentum pretty quickly, and also split the viewership right down the middle. Half the people absolutely loved it, and half the people absolutely hated it. One of those haters turned out to be Bill O’Reilly, who featured it on his show in a segment entitled Rise Of The Machines. He absurdly framed it as child abuse in an attempt to get his viewership riled up. As a result we received death threats, alongside outpourings of support, and because we had tagged the end of the video with a Bastard Fairies song entitled “We’re All Going To Hell”, we also gained a lot of new fans.

We were getting 20,000 hits a day on our website and doing similar amounts of downloads of our album. Our marketing budget was zero, we had spent zero on making the album, and each of the videos was made for zero. 

GETTING THE DEAL

We hadn’t even thought about making money let alone getting a record deal, we were just having too much fun making music and causing a stir. An Independent label called Adrenaline Records, who had distribution through Warner Music, said they wanted to sign us. Our reply was – you do realize our album is available for free and we are not going to change that. They said yes, but they wanted to find a way to make it work. So we agreed that they could release the album, only if we retained full rights, and when we parted company we would owe them no money if there were any debt remaining.

We prepared a double disc CD/DVD combo for the Adrenaline release, with 5 bonus tracks not available on the free download. By this time we were approaching 500,000 individual free downloads on tracks from the album. Upon release of the album to stores, the head of the label expressed his concern as to why would anyone buy an album if they can download it for free. I believe his decision to pull back on promotion due to this line of thinking ultimately cost them a lot of sales. It was just a few months later that Radiohead followed The Bastard Fairies lead, and released an album for free with also physical version of the album available. This clearly demonstrated, as we now know, that free could generate and compliment sales. 

In the end The Bastard Fairies album went on to do well over 1 Million individual track downloads and is still available for free to this day. Although the band has been inactive for nearly 2 years we still get 400 hits a day on our Youtube videos.

IN CONCLUSION 

In reality if you want to know your best chance of securing a deal in todays climate it would be utilizing a mix of everything that got me deals in the past:

  1. Have a strong live performance, coupled with an ever-growing following as The Hoax did, by playing anywhere and everywhere.
  2. Showing that you have the abilities to do more than just music and embrace emerging technologies as The Davey Brothers did.
  3. Being innovative with distribution and have endless creative content like the Bastard Fairies did, especially embracing video. Plus not be afraid to speak your mind, or be limited by boundaries that have been laid out before.
  4. And of course have great songs that continue to connect with your core audience and bring new listeners in.
  5. Don't go for the deal, aim at building a fanbase and a deal will come if you build it right.

Do you have all these bases covered? Because if you don’t, you know there will be someone coming right up behind you, who is younger, smarter, more determined, better looking, and more skilled, waiting to pounce on any opportunity you might miss.

THE BASTARD FAIRIES – DIRTY SEXY KILL KILL

Robin Davey is an Independent musician and Head of Music and Film Development at GROWVision and runs FreeMusicAcademy.com follow him on Twitter @mr_robin_davey

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3 Comments

  1. Your conclusion doesn’t disappoint Robin! A great read, and I’m impressed by your foresight and creativity.
    I’d argue that rather than utilizing a broad mix of strategies, artists would be better off picking one or two that they can really excel at. You don’t want to be a jack of all trades, master of none. I’m not exactly a success story yet, but fwiw, I don’t perform or make videos.

  2. Thanks Brian: All are an outlet for your creativity. Money is tight and proficiency is key, from independent artists through to top tier corporations, multiple abilities is what gets you ahead nowadays. To succeed you have to be adept at many things. However it is the idea that is the main thing as it is far easier to execute it than ever before. A video shot on your cell phone can get millions of hits if it is a great idea.

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