Your Idolators are not entirely naive about how the music business operates: We realize that behind every hit song or album is a cabal of handlers, promoters and pluggers, which is why most awards-show shout-out sessions are longer than the shows themselves. That said, we were dumbstruck by the promo CD we received this week from L.A. band the Colour, which lists no fewer than ten behind-the-scenes players. So why do they need so many people, anyway? After the click-through, a breakdown of who does what to whom (at least as far as we can tell; any biz vets who want to add their two cents are welcome to comment below).
MANAGEMENT: Responsible for making the whole operation tick: They take meetings on the band’s behalf, help members with day-to-day crises, steer decision-making, and generally act as a buffer between the musicians and the labels. The fortysomething guy you see at the side of the stage, staring incessantly at his Treo? That’s a manager. The real ones all sort of look like concerned dads, while the wannabes all look like twentysomething scenesters trying to eke out a legitimate living.
PUBLICITY: Their job is to get the word out by sending out advances to music journalists, coordinating interviews and photo shoots, and making sure everyone’s good and tanked at the band’s live shows. Bigger, tabloid-target stars sometimes have a music publicist and a personal publicist.
RADIO PROMOTION: Sometimes confused with publicists, they’re in charge of soliciting the song for play, nagging radio stations as much as possible, and reporting all the airplay back to the artist and management. Lots of dirty pool to be played here, as evidenced by Elliot Spitzer’s crackdown last year on major-label payola deals.
VIDEO PROMOTIONS: We’re not entirely sure what this entails in the age of YouTube, so we’ll take it straight from PR/marketing firm Girlie Action’s own site: “Girlie Action services music videos to all the CVC reporting outlets, including broadcast, cable, closed circuit (DMX, Screenblast, etc.), video pools, nightclubs and other lifestyle venues. We also work with all of the key web sites offering video streams.”
INTERNET PROMOTIONS: Really? Internet promotions? Isn’t it supposed to be “Newfangled Digital Media” or something? The Internet is a utility, after all; putting someone in charge of “Internet Promotions” is like making them VP of Telephone Marketing. Anyway, we’re guessing this has something to do with iTunes, Insound, or getting pesky bloggers to take down pre-release MP3s.
LIFESTYLE PROMOTIONS: This job requires a strong command of annoying buzzwords like “branding,” “seeding” and “buzzwords.” A lifestyle promoter gets the album out to clothing stores, nightclub promoters, fashionistas, etc., then comes home at night and beats the shit out of a life-size dummy made up to look like Cory Kennedy.
BOOKING AGENT: Takes care of the gigs. Based solely on this example, most booking agents also have awesome names.
IT probably goes without mentioning that it’s sorta humiliating to wonder what my mailman thinks when I get 10 envelopes a month with the name “Girlie Action” stamped in the upper-left corner.
And with a band as bland and flavorless as the Colour, it just makes me think of the “it takes a village” metaphor, where the publicity teams are working harder to promote the group than the band itself obviously did writing the music. Ah, the ironies of this convoluted age of cross-medium marketing.
that list shows the very reason why so many “players” are necessary. with very, very few exceptions, records dont’ sell themselves. the machinations are not obvious to consumers but a natural fact to insiders. there’s a growing myth that bands can just release songs online and do away with the machine. it’s an option, but the machine can do more. refer to the ny times’ article from 2006 sxsw; there’s a lot of deal-making going on behind new bands, even those viewed as products of the internet.
as for this particular list, it shows that some of the services usually handled in-house by major labels are augmented by third parties such as girlie action. smaller labels can outsource almost all functions (sales/marketing, production, publicity, radio promotion (usually to college), street promotion, lifestyle promotion, etc).
emi has its own radio promotions department. it’s not unusual for the name and contact info of such label employees to be listed on promotional materials. three of the services are handled by only one company, girlie action. booking tends to be done outside of the label and management. retail is naturally handled internally. so really there are five players listed: emi, girlie action, big hassle, little big man booking and new noise management.
technically, the list could be 100 names long if all the interns, entry level plebes, street marketing reps, sales reps, lawyers, people in licensing, accountants, middle managers and executives within emi were listed. and that doesn’t even get into bmi/ascap and publishing.
Don’t forget about my own personal dream job, Posse Member. (I’m pretty sure people don’t say “posse” much anymore, but they should.) Regardless, I can wave white towels above my head like a motherfucker.
I honestly can’t believe the tenacity of The Colour. Haven’t they been trying to “make it” (rather unsuccessfully) for like six years now or something? Anyone know the story about that?
Shouldn’t they have given up by now? They must really owe EMI a whole, whole lot of money. And thank you for illustrating the cost of promoting this latest release can’t be cheap.
With most smaller bands, the fact that the publicity and/or marketing is being outsourced is generally regarded as a good sign, i.e. that the label has enough confidence in the act to lay out the money for another publicist besides the one they have in-house (and most labels of any size have an in-house publicist). Labels all used to have fantastic in-house publicists but that was when labels had a definite sound that the publicist could get behind, rather than the throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach they take today. This also is somewhat different from how it works in hip-hop, where all labels were initially 2-person operations and so certain indie publicists would go around working different projects as a matter of necessity. This actually looks a lot more like the contact sheet for a hip-hop release than a rock one, but maybe that’s just a sign of how much hip-hop rules the industry now.
As far as I can tell, all video promoters do is order takeout lunch from Pastis on their own dime and then spend 2 weeks in LA.
I think Internet Promotions is called New Media with record labels. Maybe that’s just an IGA thing. Lifestyle Promotions sounds like fun, actually, but those people are probably the least important.
Apparently this brain trust has their fingers on Brandon Flower’s pulse.
Did Idolator just make a Don Henley allusion? I feel dirty.
Where can I go to meet Lifestyle Promoters?
RE: INTERNET PROMOTIONS
The term, from how we’ve defined it (at least internally) essentially represents the synchronized usage of all the available online tools – publicity, streaming audio, editorial, blogs, etc.
Given how many options there are for delivering (or simply making available) music content online, it really can be a sizable effort to coordinate all the areas.
Having said that, a lot of people performing “Internet Promotions” are indeed doing nothing more for artists than what they can do for themselves – contacting relevant media outlets, sending CDs, and following up…