MURKETING

Ghostly International: The Q&A

I’ve been wanting to do a Q&A with an entrepreneurial type in the wild and woolly underground music business, and I think we have a good one here: Mr. Sam Valenti IV, of the independent avant-pop/electronic record label Ghostly International (Matthew Dear, Tadd Mullinix (aka James T. Cotton, Dabrye), Mobius Band, etc.). My Q’s and his A’s follow on subjects such as: founding a label “on the fault line of mass culture” while still in his teens, why branding matters for a music company, how a record label is like an art museum, what it takes for a new artist’s first CD to break even, and dreaming up new projects and new revenue streams like the USB-as-CD-alternative Ghostly created for the famous design store Moss. Here goes.

Q: So let’s see if I have this right. Ghostly started in 1998/1999, when you would’ve been around 18 years old, basically because you heard and really liked Matthew Dear, and decided to record and distribute “Hands Up For Detroit.” 500 copies, on vinyl I think. How did you go about executing the basics on this, like locating some entity to press the records, and another to distribute them? And wasn’t Napster-mania pretty much full blown by then? Did that have any kind of impact on your thinking about what Ghostly should be, and/or might become?

A: Matthew and I met at a house party. I was a lonely wayward freshman and had been DJing house parties, and he was making music for fun, but we both wanted to make records. After a year of making tracks together, I took a DAT of songs that he did, along with some from our mentor, Disco D, to London, where I found a place that would cut and press your record in one shot. I guess it was wish-fulfillment in a way, that’s how I view my college years, as very fortunate, in that meeting a group of people allowed something to happen.

The idea of Ghostly was there, but Matthew was the inspiration to take up arms and create it. When we started, I felt that we missed our chance twice, in both the beginning with the P2P revolution and then a few years later with 9/11 and the death of the “good times.” I had envisioned a luxury electronic “brand,” but the idea of both pushing high-end goods and running a profitable record label seemed far-fetched after that.

I think Ghostly was founded on the fault-line of mass culture. We use the term “Avant-Pop” to refer to some of our output, in that what we make is popular music that has been subverted by our personal beliefs and preferences, which aren’t in line with what the word “pop” means. This attitude applies across all of our output, this sense of art/entertainment that is not pre-prescribed or “destinational”. There’s a great freedom in not being treated like a demographic or a Consumer, and that’s what Ghostly is about. Read more

Dept. of sentences I never thought I would read

Coudal.com: “It’s not Van Halen without Michael Anthony.”

Band logo power

Interesting fact in this Montreal Gazette review of a book called The Art of the Band T-shirt. The authors apparently interviewed a number of T designers, including Arturo Vega, who did the Ramones’ visuals. He says band T’s, or maybe T’s in general:

“are the single most important part of popular culture. People want to identify with something.” Maybe this is why Vega-designed shirts outsell Ramones albums by a factor of 10 or more.

Why kick out the jams when you can rock the T? The presidential seal remix is, after all, one of the best band logos ever.
(Thanks Dave!)

Boxed Set

In Consumed: The Buddha Machine: A portable music player serenades fans by eliminating the element of choice.

A few years ago, an experimental music duo called FM3 toured Europe, playing a 40-minute set that the duo’s founder Christiaan Virant describes as “very reductionist, very minimalist, very sparse.” He and Zhang Jian, who are based in Beijing, performed on laptops. Some of these compositions were later released on a CD by Staalplaat, a specialty label based in Amsterdam; it sold about a thousand copies. In the context of avant-garde music, that’s not bad: “If someone can sell 2,000 CDs,” Virant says with a laugh, “they’re like a superstar.” So it’s hard to find the right superlative to describe what happened when some of that same sparse music was released again — not on CD but in a little plastic box called the Buddha Machine. Two years later, sales are approaching 50,000 units and still going strong….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

Additional links: FM3; Forced Exposure; Disquiet interview; Boomkat interview; Studio 360 episode.

Multiplatinum, multiplatform … then what?

This is how most pop stars operate now: as brand-name corporations taking in revenue streams from publishing, touring, merchandising, advertising, ringtones, fashion, satellite radio gigs or whatever else their advisers can come up with. Rare indeed are holdouts like Bruce Springsteen who simply perform and record. The usual rationale is that hearing a U2 song in an iPod commercial or seeing Shakira’s face on a cellphone billboard will get listeners interested in the albums that these artists release every few years after much painstaking effort.

So writes Jon Pareles in the NYT today, in an article about the business of Prince. Who, he argues, fits the pattern in some ways, but is different many others. Still, he writes, Prince “doesn’t have to go multiplatinum — he’s multiplatform.”

Well said. What I wonder is how multiplatform models will get built in the future. Prince, U2, Sting, even Shakira and 50 Cent, owe a good chunk of their brand equity to old-style big record company mass market oriented tactics (the kind that resulted in multiplatinum sales) that seem to be increasingly incapable of building new pop stars of similar stature. Maybe the American Idol creations have some of that stature, but it’s not clear to me if it will be lasting, and in any case it’s hardly a pure grass roots thing.

Seems like stars who made their name in the “old days” (that is, anytime up to a few years ago) have a lasting advantage in the multiplatform marketplace.

There’s a strange one in the jungle

Years ago, in the Slate days, I made some throwaway reference to the Judy’s and was pretty surprised to get immediate and enthusiastic responses about it. While murketing.com ain’t Slate in terms of online readership, maybe someone out there will want to know that in an interview with Houstonist, Judy’s member Jeff Walton says:

The million dollar question: When will The Judy’s music be available on CD or digitally?

Very soon, we are working on it now. Hopefully within the next couple of months. We will have the CDs available through a website (wastedtalentrecords.com), iTunes, and hopefully through some stores. We also plan on having t-shirts and other things. After that, we are going to do a Washarama anniversary special edition which will be a multi disc set.

Last time I looked into it, buying a vinyl, used copy of Washarama was a $50+ proposition, if you could locate one. So I’m pretty pleased to hear this. You, on the other hand, may not care, probably because you don’t have a memory of getting your nose bloodied by a hurled cup during “Guyana Punch” in about 1986 at Numbers in the Montrose. But cut me some slack, okay? And just wait, Wes Anderson will put “All The Pretty Girls” in a movie at some point, and you’ll get it.

Or not.

Rock and rockets

Pretty interesting NYT dispatch today from Sderot, an Israeli town near the Gaza Strip, where there’s a vital local-music scene:

In the Israeli public consciousness, Sderot is a place of poverty and danger. It has been barraged by more than 4,000 rockets in the last six years, including nearly 200 since the shaky cease-fire began in November. Six people have died from the attacks, and dozens of homes have been damaged.

And yet Sderot is also the hometown of a pop culture hero of the moment: Kobi Oz, the lead singer of the Teapacks, the Israeli pick for the popular Eurovision song contest. Mr. Oz made headlines in March when organizers of the contest suggested that his song “Push the Button” might be disqualified for carrying an inappropriate political message. [The Teapacks are scheduled to perform in the Eurovision semifinal in May.] The song riffs on the Israeli fear of being obliterated by an atomic bomb.

The link.

Not the same good old boy

The Boston Globe isn’t the very first place I turn to for thoughts on the implications of current trends in country music, but: This editorial argues that “rumblings of discontent within the world of country music” regarding the Iraq war, reflect “how much the nation’s mood has shifted since March 2003.”

It’s telling when country luminary Merle Haggard has an entry on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of top protest songs. Country musicians and their fans tend to hail from conservative states with high enlistment rates.

Then again, the toll of the war on the sons and daughters of these states has been acute.

… the jingoistic swagger of Toby Keith’s [“Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”] has given way to more somber songs seeking proper respect for returning service members. Trace Adkins’s “Arlington” describes a soldier who is buried in the famous national cemetery. Even Worley shows a flash of disillusionment: “If I’m not exactly the same good old boy that you ran around with before,” he sings, “I just came back from a war.”

Via The WSJ’s Informed Reader.

Branching Out

In Consumed: Umpqua Bank: Selling a financial institution as a lifestyle brand.

Ours is the age of lifestyle. From clothes to coffee to cookware, every product or service seems to represent not just function but a statement about who we are and how we live. So the fact that Umpqua Bank, a chain based Portland, Ore., recently announced that it had “released its first album” makes a certain kind of sense. Umpqua isn’t just a financial institution, of course. It’s a lifestyle….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.

Additional links: Umpqua; Rumblefish.

Mixing the remixes (or something like that)

Earlier this year, as you may know, Brian Eno and David Byrne marked the 25th anniversary of their astonishing 1981 collaboration album, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, by launching a site that made available all the multitracks for two songs from the album to any and all remixers (who sign up with a specific but apparently pretty enlightened licensing agreement). Our friend Disquiet has kept tabs on the results, pointing out some of the more interesting creations — but recently he offered a new spin on the whole idea: “Our Lives In The Bush of Disquiet.” As he explains:

For Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet, I contacted a dozen musicians whose work I admire; I wanted to hear what their renditions of the Eno and Byrne tracks might sound like, and none of them had yet joined in the activities at the bush-of-ghosts.com website. With only a few exceptions, these individuals already participate regularly in the loose community of musicians who post their own music for free download on the web, via netlabels, social networking services or their own websites.

The 12 graciously agreed to participate in this project and the resulting compilation ranges from tributes to reconsiderations, from distant reflections to associative interpretations. There are takes on “Help Me Somebody” that milk the funk in the preacher’s voice and there are takes on “A Secret Life” so quiet as to make the original sound like rock’n’roll by comparison.

I was quite interested to hear about this, because I don’t know anybody who is better versed on the curious intersections of music and technology than Disquiet; the site, revolving around “Reflections on ambient/electronic music, and interviews with the people who make it,” is a constant trove of great information and discovery. Basically, if anybody could come up with a compelling curated iteration of a thoroughly wild-and-woolly phenomenon like the Bush of Ghosts remix project, it’s Disquiet.

The 12 remixes, as well as front-and-back cover art by boon (design), are available for listening or downloading here (where there’s also more about each of the contributors and their tracks) and here. My own favorites: “My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts,” by Prehab; “If You Make Your Bed in Heaven,” by Roddy Schrock, and “Not Enough Africa,” by Ego Response Technician (who, I should disclose, is also a friend of mine).