 |
NO MORE CUBICLES: Ten Mile
Tide hit the road last year. From left, Mazzoni,
Clemetson, Morales, Justin and Jason Munning,
and Kessler revisit campus. |
as their battered rv rolled
up to the next gig, the sextet slid into their flip-flops
and gulped down the last of their SpaghettiOs. The crowd
in Manhattan—Manhattan, Kansas—flaunted
a huge banner proclaiming “Ten Mile Tide, #1 Indie
Band in the Country.” An “interesting”
claim, says TMT’s lead singer, Marc Mazzoni. Nevertheless,
it was a milestone for the Stanford-bred, folk-inspired
rock group. “It’s pretty cool when you go
someplace you’ve never been and people know your
songs,” says Mazzoni, ’99. Especially when
it’s happened without the help of the mainstream
music industry.
Today’s musicians can produce and distribute
their work using innovative software and the Internet.
Caught off guard, America’s giant record companies
are floundering. Most blame Internet piracy for the
$4.6 billion industry loss last year. But others in
the music biz argue that the problem is not that technology
enables theft, but that the industry has failed to innovate
in light of technological changes.
Howie Klein, former president of Reprise Records, developed
the careers of such artists as Depeche Mode and Alanis
Morissette. At a recent Graduate School of Business
conference on entertainment, he said major record companies
no longer offer value. Klein compared them to banks—providing
money for artists to live on while they create—but
says the record companies charge “a lot more than
any bank.” Sooner or later, he says, artists will
realize there is another way. “Why should an artist
give the record companies a piece of the action?”
he asked.
Jason Colton of Dionysian Productions handles marketing
for the band Phish, which plans to break up in August.
Colton, ’94, says the major labels do their best
work selling blockbuster hits. “But that definition
of success doesn’t apply to a good majority of
bands in the business,” he says.
Musicians today see that record companies, looking
for the likeliest hit, are interested in artists who
already have done much of the legwork themselves. Many
new artists—including a few homegrown on the Farm—have
figured out they not only can do this on their own,
probably they must. They are taking full advantage of
modern technology and using their business savvy to
make it in the new music scene. For them, there has
been little guidance along the way. But their experience
provides a sort of “how-to” guide for those
who follow.
Step 1
KEEP AN EYE ON THE MAIN CHANCE.
One thing that hasn’t changed much is the role
fate seems to play in the inception of a group. In the
case of Ten Mile Tide, identical twins wound up with
equally musical college roommates. Jason Munning, ’99,
lead electric guitarist, and his brother Justin, ’99,
an acoustic guitarist, jammed with fiddler Stephen Kessler,
’99, while at Stanford. After graduation, lead
singer and keyboardist Mazzoni officially joined the
band. Some of their first gigs were at Stanford’s
Coffee House. TMT ran an online ad with craigslist and
completed the roster with Jeff Clemetson on bass and
John Morales on drums. The shaggy-haired six live in
their RV, Sadie, while on tour and call the Bay Area
home. They share business duties; all of them write
songs; and they entertain themselves on their few days
off by updating their weblog for fans and indulging
in Cadbury Egg-eating contests.
For Ama Ofosu-Barko, ’98, MA ’00, priorities
changed suddenly when she was struck by a car junior
year. Although she had sung with Stanford’s a
cappella group Talisman, she planned to become a doctor.
After her accident, she dropped the premed lifestyle
to pursue her wildest dream, and a singer/guitarist’s
soulful rock career was born. Known professionally as
Ama, the rising Bay Area star regularly hires local
musicians for shows and recordings.
Rachael Sage (Karen Weitzman, ’93) was pointed
toward artistry with childhood ballet lessons and a
degree in drama. After graduation, she settled into
a New York apartment with a boxful of copies of her
first album. Sage’s music is along the lines of
Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, but in the early years she
supplemented her income with commercial jingles: her
first big break was a Crystal Light spot.
 |
STEP BY STEP: Door opened when
Sage sent a song to a star. |
Step 2
PUT AWAY THE HOME KARAOKE MACHINE.
Lately, mid-range recording studios have dropped their
prices to stay in business, but an artist doesn’t
need to leave home to record an album anymore. Basic
studio equipment costs a fraction of what it did years
ago. A mixing board once priced up to $300,000 can now
be purchased for $10,000. Software programs let artists
record directly into their home computers and burn CDs
on the spot.
Jay Kadis, who teaches Advanced Sound Recording Technology
at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in
Music and Acoustics, says ease of recording has brought
a boom of independent bands. “Whether they’ll
be good or not is another story,” he adds. Record
companies used to weed out much of the “rough”
music out there; increasingly, discernment is left to
the consumer. The proliferation of albums spreads music
faster and wider and leads to more crossover in genres.
“The world is a big place; U.S. bands might make
it in Japan or the Philippines,” Kadis says. Sage,
for example, has done four European tours.
Recording is still a considerable investment for the
first-timer, though. According to Starpolish.com, an
advice site for musicians, if an acoustic performer
can record an entire set in about one hour (and only
very accomplished singers can), a good-quality demo
at a high-end studio costs about $1,700. And that’s
just the master CD. A small run of duplicates can be
burned on a personal computer, but more ambitious artists
have 1,000 copies made for approximately $1,500.
Ama’s total cost for 1,000 CDs approached $4,000.
But for her, the CD was well worth the credit card debt.
She used the demo to apply for the New England Music
Organization conference. Once accepted, she entered
her album in the conference’s demo derby. “They
listen to the first minute of everyone’s song
and give you a critique,” she explains. “Even
before the first minute was over, [mine] started skipping!”
But the demo opened doors: Grammy-winning producer Jack
Douglas liked it, and he keeps in touch with Ama. Sales
from the two CDs she has put out aren’t her main
revenue generator—ticket sales pay the musicians
she hires—but they cover her production costs.
Step 3
TURN ON YOUR PC, UPLOAD YOUR CD AND MAKE AN
MP3 SO FANS CAN P2P.
Shortly after they released their first album and it
became available online, the members of Ten Mile Tide
sat at their day jobs, where every 15 minutes they’d
get another e-mail asking when the band would be touring.
“And we’re like, man, we gotta get on the
road,” says Jason Munning. E-mail is the least
of it; indie artists have embraced technology to record,
distribute, promote—in other words, run their
entire business. Sage is a big believer in music sites
MP3.com and iTunes and makes her work available online,
“but not so much that [fans] wouldn’t buy
an album.” She has sold 30,000 CDs at shows (she
currently has 150 to 200 tour dates per year) and through
independent online music stores like CD Baby.
In 2003, Ten Mile Tide was featured on CNN for its
outspoken support of KaZaA, a software program that
utilizes peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to let users
download files directly from others’ computers.
While many artists make a few of their songs or portions
of many songs available for listening or downloading,
TMT offers its entire repertoire free. Users have downloaded
their songs more than 10 million times, and the band
members say it was this exposure that enabled them to
quit their jobs in 2003 and tour.
“Even in five to 10 years,” says Clemetson,
“we plan on touring to make our money. It is proven
that the success of most bands comes from live shows
and not album sales, and we believe that downloading
does not hinder sales at all.” TMT sells about
3,000 albums per year. “Unless you’re moving
two million CDs or something like that,” Mazzoni
says, “it seems like a pretty good idea to make
your music as accessible as possible.”
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WILD DREAM: Ama will open for
the Dave Matthews Band on the second stage of
Sleep Train Amphitheatre in Marysville, Calif.,
in August. |
Step 4
SAY GOODBYE TO THE 1040EZ.
“I was booking a gig,” Mazzoni says of a
long-ago phone conversation, “and said, ‘Yeah,
can I speak to the booking agent?’ He said, ‘You’re
the booking agent. I’m called a talent buyer.’
It was a semantic argument that was just the stupidest
thing ever.”
No doubt about it, this is a business, and it has a
learning curve. Make an album, distribute it, plan the
tour, and manage your accounting. “Everything
from RV maintenance to booking gigs,” says Mazzoni,
“to doing press to making sure everyone eats and
doesn’t get scurvy to practicing and then actually
the creative art of working on new stuff. You’re
pulling from all these aspects of life I never thought
I would need.”
Ten Mile Tide owns three businesses—the band,
their own record label (Copper’s Dish Records)
and a publishing company (JMOB). They have learned to
focus their publicity tactics: rather than spend money
on mass fliers, they utilize free e-mail advertising
and through their website formed a “street team”—more
than 250 fans from 42 states who help promote the band
in local markets. Sage started her own label, MPress,
in 1996 and targets niche markets like feminist and
Jewish publications for promotion. Her media kits include
tiny hard candies with a Rachael Sage logo.
Ama’s street team is managed by the web-based
agent Streetlava, which rewards fans with free CDs and
other merchandise when they help their favorite artists—for
example, by calling in to Bay Area radio station KCNL
104.9 and requesting an Ama song. College stations are
the usual outlets for independent artists, but Ama has
broken into mainstream radio and that has led to major
live appearances with other 104.9 artists. “It’s
always a crazy thrill to be up there playing those shows,”
says Ama. “There are people I don’t know
who know my songs because they’ve been on the
radio. It’s really neat.”
For artists who are accustomed to rallying their friends
and anyone else they can think of for each show, having
strangers know your songs and want your CD is the ultimate.
Ama still makes ends meet by working as a family helper
in Woodside, and the headlights shorting out on TMT’s
touring RV might require some tight budgeting, but these
musicians are doing on their own what used to be the
province of multimillion-dollar companies. “We’re
extremely competent at running this business,”
Munning says. “We’re all overachievers and
we’re all putting in 150 percent to make this
work.” They’ve left cubicle land and are
doing what they love, even if it means eating a lot
of spaghetti.
Step 5
KEEP BUILDING THE RÉSUMÉ
Seven years ago, Sage contacted successful independent
Ani DiFranco, who, like Sage, has turned down record
label offers. “I had written a song for her, and
I just sent it with a note and told her I hoped she
enjoyed it.” A few months later, Sage received
an invitation to go on tour with DiFranco. Every break
like this, Sage says, has been “a little energy
injection . . . another stepping-stone.”
While the rocker life occasionally means hanging backstage
with Maroon 5 (Ama), touring with the Lilith Fair (Sage),
or scoring a free lobster dinner from a fisherman in
Maine (TMT), independent artists have to keep hustling.
Armed with her first CD, Sage walked into Tower Records
in downtown New York pretending to be her own publicist—fake
name and all. When that album became the store’s
best-selling consignment CD, she asked, “Can I
quote you on that?” It was the beginning of her
approach to sending out press releases, signing up for
contests (she was a grand prize winner in the 2003 John
Lennon Songwriting Contest and winner in the Billboard
Songwriting Contest) and generally using “whatever
means I could to be creative and try to get to the next
level.”
Ama entered the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in
2003 and was one of three finalists in the rock category.
Her website spotlights many accolades, including a December
2002 feature from the San Jose Mercury News entertainment
section. Her music was used in the independent movie
1. Still, Ama finds it hard to talk about herself.
“You can’t be shy about it, which is just
the hardest thing,” she says. “You have
to promote, promote, promote, because you never know
who knows someone in whatever arena that can help you.”
Step 6
REMEMBER, IT'S ABOUT THE MUSIC.
Both Ten Mile Tide and Ama acknowledge that at some
point the business side of their jobs might crowd out
their creative time. “And if I’m busy doing
sales, radio promotion, all that stuff but I’m
not writing music,” Ama says, “what’s
the point?” Still, given their experience wearing
all the hats of the music industry, they will consider
a deal only when they find someone who meets their standards.
These musicians also figure that every success they
garner increases their leverage with a record company
in terms of financial arrangements and creative control.
It’s a strategy that has worked for other bands.
Phish, for example, was independent for eight years
before signing with Elektra. Colton, their marketing
man, thinks a band that attracts large live audiences
may be able to craft a better deal with a label because
a recording isn’t as critical to the band’s
success. For Phish, already playing to arena-size crowds
on the East Coast, the record contract was a chance
to pursue a larger audience while maintaining artistic
control. Since signing in 1991, Phish has released 34
albums, including eight golds and one platinum, selling
more than 7 million worldwide. But even if they kept
a full $15 profit on each CD, it would pale in comparison
to their tour revenues. In 1999-2000 alone, Phish grossed
more than $61 million in ticket sales.
Until they hit the cover of Rolling Stone, these
Stanford artists will keep on keepin’ on. Ama
plays to Bay Area crowds while her mom, Ama’s
best sales rep, reports that she’s sold 300 CDs
in the past two months. In May, TMT wrapped up a two-month
tour with more than 50 shows at universities, clubs
and, yes, a return to Manhattan. Is there any point
at which they would give up music? “There seems
like no reason to ever do that,” says Clemetson,
“because we all love what we’re doing.”
Sage, whose sixth album comes out in August, now employs
a full-time label manager and three part-time staff.
She is looking for another independent artist to join
her label and has no plans to accept a record company
deal. “In the indie world, it’s such an
evolution,” Sage says, describing what she has
learned and the camaraderie she’s enjoyed in the
New York music scene. “For me, so far, this has
been the way.” |
