How Much of a Role Do Numbers and Music Play?
by David Wilkes
The questions have been asked: Does Soundscan play an important part in an A&R person's decision about signing an act, and how do A&R people like music to be presented to them—live, CDs or MP3s? I will try to deal with these two questions in this column.
In dealing with Soundscan numbers, I use this information and find it very important for a number of reasons. The main reason is that as part of my business plan for Koch, I have to sign artists that are already famous, since I am the vice president of adult/jazz music, and that includes all those formats such as singer-songwriter, bluegrass, blues, etc.
It is so difficult for an independent label to spend the time that it takes to develop a new artist, and you can thank the major labels for making this business such a "now" business. In my early days at Vanguard Records, if we really believed in an artist, we would sign them and then hope that by the third album we would have an important artist and a commercial success. Today, the majors swamp the market with new artists with gigantic budgets and advances, and thus lots of marketing monies. Retail, shrinking all the time, will only devote shelf space to CDs that they feel can sell big numbers quickly. For a major, if a CD doesn't sell within a very small window, they go on to another artist.
As an independent, we need to know that we can compete for retail space. The way we do that is to sign artists who have had success selling CDs at retail (mainly concerned here with the few major retail establishment left: Best Buy, Borders, Barnes & Nobles, Circuit City and Trans World). So if the buyers at these chains have a recent sales history of an artist, they will bring in a good supply of the new release and thus give us a chance to market this CD while it is actually in the retail stores.
This might be applicable to name artists, but not necessarily applicable to the readers of this column. So, if you have a barcode on your CD and can get it into these retail stores on a consignment basis, you could build up a Soundscan story, but to make it interesting to A&R people you should concentrate on a small territory so the A&R people can get a sense of what is happening on a regional breakout. Labels have A&R people who just do research.
If you cannot get Soundscan to count your venue sales because of their policies against one-artist labels, you should keep track of your factory pressing orders to show to A&R that you are actually moving units. The most impressive factors are the gigs you have, the press you get from local papers, and radio play locally, backed with factory pressing orders, individual testimonials from club owners and presenters about sales, and the scans you get from local retail stores that do scan your sale.
Now, to discuss the merits of sending CDs versus MP3's versus live gigs.
I can't go to every show of every band that contacts me, so the first order of events is the CD or the MP3. But before that, the most important object is to get the attention of the A&R person so they will listen to either. That's the essence of this question, and that should be the next column. To answer the CD vs. MP3 question, I would rather have a CD with a simple bio and itinerary, because even the simple action of an MP3 takes minutes away from my corresponding on the computer while listening to a CD, which is what I am used to doing. Also, a good percentage of the time, MP3s sound like hell, skip or just stop.
But again, I am of an age that is used to CDs, so it's a nice idea to ask the A&R person or their assistant what is most effective when you send the music. Just don't ask the A&R person to go to confusing sites and take the shrink-wrap off the CD, if that's what you send. What a time-wasting pain in the ass that is!
