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By Alex Kehoe
So you've played a few local shows, you're enjoying being
a local celebrity and you've decide that you are going to try and "make it" as
a professional band. The life of a famous band musician certainly looks fun
and may even appear easy, but I assure you it is anything but easy (although
it is fun!). You will have A LOT of knock backs along the way and will have
to train yourself to become thick skinned, determined and work harder than
you ever have in your life. After all, if it were easy to become rock star
than everyone would be one!
First off, start by asking yourself "Why do I want to be in a professional
band?" If your answer is to entertain, excite and have your music heard
and loved by the masses then you may just have a chance as you realise that
it all about entertaining your audience. If that is the case, read on as I
detail some essential things you need to know and do in order to turn your
band into the real deal.
The Basics
Practice practice practice! You need to have a flawless
performance both in the music you are play and how you play it live. No promoter,
record company or manager will want you supporting their big name band (except
if you happen to be good friends with one of said people in which case you
may get a lucky ONE off) unless you can show that you are at the required
standard. You will need at least an EP. Notice how I said "at least an EP" and
not a demo! It is imperative that you have a something to give/sell to your
audience other than just your performance and that means you need at least
3 or 4 songs recorded properly in a studio. An album would be better but
if your EP really is that good it will be enough at this stage. In the same
vein, you will need a selection of merchandise to sell online and at shows.
Selling merchandise gives you free promotion as well as creating an extra
source of income, for which you will be extremely grateful at the start of
your career, when more likely than not you will be broke.
Online Marketing
Pay a professional to design an attractive website for
you and take the time to create a band profile on all the most popular musical
and social networking sites. This is the best way of keeping your fans up
to date as well as attracting new fans by allowing them to hear before they
come to see you play. Audiences always react best to songs they have heard
before so make sure you have at least one or two songs uploaded for people
to listen to for free. Often the band's website is one of the first places
music industry people will look and it will tell them everything they need
to know about your band in just a few clicks. Make sure your site gives off
the right message and shows you to be a serious act with a professional web
page complete with music, videos, professionally taken photos, past gigs,
a forum, merchandise, competitions and links to your band profile on other
reputable websites. As the excellent and very successful musician Tom Hess
once told me, "Perception is Key". If YOU make
the decision to appear professional in every way then that is exactly what
people will think you are and why shouldn't they?
Get an HD camera, which are pretty cheap these days, and film every band-related
thing you do and anything interesting too. The footage can be used to make
an obligatory montage music video. This costs you next to nothing, fans will
love it, and it looks great especially if you have some exciting live footage.
Also, if/when you become a huge success, the footage could be used to make
a band DVD which will give you another source of income and help to boost your
profile.
Is there an audience out there for you?
Regardless how "tight" you are musically and
as a band, and how professional you may be, you will only ever reach a certain
point in your musical career before grinding to a frustrating halt if you
don't excite your audience or, worse still, you don't have an audience. If
you were to play 6 shows in 6 months in whichever city and your audiences
were not increasing at each show than something is not going right. The reasons
behind this could be that you just aren't exciting the audience for some
of the following reasons:
- Your are uninteresting live;
- You sound similar if not carbon copies of other
bands around at the moment;
- There is no market for your style of music in
that area;
- There is no market for your "unique" style
of music anywhere!
As a band it's easy to come up with every excuse as to why this is rather
than admitting that you are doing something wrong. Remember, I said that in
this example your band were well rehearsed and professional so those common
reasons are not the problem. For EVERY show you play you want your audience
to leave and tell their friends how amazing they thought you were. You want
them to join your mailing list, buy your records, buy your merchandise. You
want them, without realising, to become new members of your PR team helping
to spread your band's name and music around the country. In short, you need
them, so make sure you always look after them and they will do the same for
you.
To get yourself more fans as apposed to just people who like your music, you
may find you need to tweak aspects of your act or even go back to the drawing
board and start from scratch. The trick is to make your act so exciting for
the audience that promoters and record companies will have no choice other
than to chase you down and not the other way round!
Case Study:
The Kaiser Chiefs are an excellent example of going back
to the drawing board to make their band the best that it could be. They have
enjoyed international success with over three million copies sold, were shortlisted
for the Mercury Prize and have a number one single. All this however, was
achieved after they realised that the previous band incarnation known, as "Parva" was
not working for them so they changed their style, name and wrote completely
new material, which turned around their fortune.
Some of you out there may not like the idea of this and
would probably love to label it as "selling out" but I disagree.
I don't believe there is anything wrong with a change of style if you are
going to make more people enjoy the music you are making.
Getting Signed
Most inexperienced bands seem to believe that getting signed to a record label
is their ticket to hitting the big time. They believe that once they get signed
they will have reached the end of the road with television and radio stardom
sure to follow. This is most certainly not the case and that is especially
true in this day and age. You do not need a record label to become a success
but they can certainly help you in areas such as up front financing (this money
will need to be paid back!), marketing and setting you up with good contacts.
One of the best ways to get signed, apart from being awesome, is to become
a Do It Yourself band. For example don't sit around waiting to get signed before
you start to do things such as:
- Tour
- Record and distribute your music
- Get radio play
- Film music videos.
If you're doing things for yourself and you're getting
well received by the public, it shows labels that there is a market for you
and demonstrates what a great work ethic your band has, your determination
and drive. By working that much harder to achieve your dream, you are making
the job for the record company easier. It will reduce the risk for them in
putting you onto their books. They won't have to worry about things like "If we pay for a tour
for this band how well will they cope and will people go to their shows?" because
you will already have proven yourself.
Be Imaginative
If you live in a big musical city such as London, there
will be literally thousands of bands striving for success just as you are.
Fortunately for you, if you have done all that I said up to this point, you
will already have put yourself in about the top 2% of these bands but is
that enough? Unfortunately, it isn't. You need to make your band stand out
from the rest by doing things a bit differently to make industry people take
notice of you. A recent example of this is a friend of mine's band Daytona
Lights who are just coming out now. They lived in London and put on a midday
full band show in a London train station. They held regular clubs nights
that led them to get noticed by a top producer who decided to "keep an eye" on the band as they continued working
unaided. Eight months on and the band have now recorded an album with that
producer and he arranged for the band to join the popular UK television soap "Hollyoaks" for
three months playing themselves and playing their own songs that will be available
to download instantly. Coming up with something imaginative for your band to
get noticed is something unfortunately that I can't help you with but think
hard and be creative and it really could speed things up for you just as it
did for Daytona Lights.
Case Study:
The Arctic Monkeys, whose debut album became the fastest
selling debut album in British music history, were named to be one of the
first acts to come to public attention through the internet (albeit primarily
down to their MySpace fan page). At the time it was suggested that they represented
a possible change in the way new bands were promoted and marketed. At their
early shows they gave away their demos for free to try get as many fans as
possible and started their own record label "Bang Bang" to release their first few singles
in limited way. With all the hype and media attention that followed they went
on to play at the Reading and Leeds festivals before signing to the independent
label Domino because they were attracted to the "DIY ethic" of the
owner Laurence Bell.
Alex Kehoe is an experienced session musician with a deep background in playing
for live audiences in both original and cover bands over the last eleven years
as well as working with top music producers such as Chapel Studios owner Steve
Williams (Sting, Britney Spears, Eric Clapton) and Vada Studios owner Matt
Terry (The Enemy, One Night Only)
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