Live Nation are doing some big deals in Australia at the moment. I have two thoughts about that – America’s on fire at the moment and they’re spending ridiculous money, yet our festivals are saturated to a point where I don’t think there’s any room for new players. The Live Nation deal allows the globalisation of that.
Do we get the quality and variety of acts then breaking through more festivals? I doubt it. I can’t see any other players in the marketplace coming in to compete in this current format.
I think, if anything, we’ll lose a festival this year, maybe two, and from that side of things, all the artists are trying to get out of their 360 deals. Everyone’s trying to get their autonomy.
Then again, the lure of the big American money and the festival deals will ultimately shine through in the short term. In the long term that’ll create money around the resurgence of emerging techno and minimal indie core rock bands; rock and roll will be back within three years, and they’ll ride the wave of over commercialisation of our product.
At what point does it become generic? Something needs to change. Artists need to be real and potentially connect at clubs, bucking the trend, connecting with people one-on-one in venues as opposed to standing in front of 30,000 people in a venue. It’s the personalisation of product.
Both are in many ways. I’m happy to sell to the festivals when they’ve got the biggest budgets to do so. If we need to create exclusivity around that we’ll do that for our highest profile artists, but in saying so it means that small artists won’t be afforded main stages, which is the only place I like to put my artists, I don’t see the value of side stages. We’re main or don’t bother.
However, therein creates a brand new niche for second-tier guys to create a cult following which will ultimately give them the fuel to get on main stage. So we’re not saying no to second-tier artists; we work with clubs, we’ll invest in social media on our artists. Every venue now has a social media plan delivered to them to say ‘This is how you engage with our artists’, otherwise the artist will not turn up.
It’s all about increasing eyeballs and fans for both the artist and the venue. Off the back of that we then say, ‘What do you need to do as an artist to get more revenue and release more records?’
We work with every media outlet; we’ve got our own radio show, TV show. Yet with all of that comes responsibility. I’m not naive to say I can just program my own label stuff and that’s all I’ll do; that’d make for a pretty boring show, we program everyone’s stuff. If I don’t play it when I’m out DJing, I don’t play it on the show.
We try and have great relationships with all radio stations and all TV outlets to facilitate our behind the scenes vision, it’s now come down to YouTube and Twitter and that sort of stuff. The video clip behind the scenes is more important now than the clip itself.
It’s honest and it shows their character, it shows who they are as people, whereas in a film clip you can be whoever you want to be.
It’s really small. We don’t need one to be honest. From a record side of things we just have great relationships with iTunes and all our assets. We’ve got dedicated bookers we use for our artists, but we took our phone number out of the Yellow Pages, I said, ‘If people can’t find me they shouldn’t engage with me’.
We don’t actively go out and push. If anything it’s about diversification now, because we replace artists with new artists – every time we let someone go it’s because we’ve got someone better to replace them with. Music is the driver for us, and our product is the driver, people come to us.
Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
