SoundFreak

When you talk to musicians who have had disastrous relationships with record companies, or who have had releases that have failed to sell, you will often hear from them that ‘it was down to bad marketing’. Conversely, marketing departments are often blamed for pushing rubbish acts, and launching them in such a way that they are forced into public consciousness thus achieving a degree of success that more credible musicians feel these acts don’t deserve. With all this in mind, Sissy meets up with Neil Martin, marketing manager at Sony/BMG to get his side of the story and hopefully find out the truth of the matter; can marketing make or break a band, regardless of talent? Is it true that anyone could become famous and successful if enough money and imagination is spent on them?

You might imagine that your typical marketing man would be hard-nosed, cynical and manipulative but Neil is none of these things. He’s humble, modest, unassuming and a genuine music fan who has managed to retain a degree of innocence despite working at the rockface where music merges uncomfortably with business.

SISSY: What’s your official job title?

NEIL: I’m currently Marketing Manager for Catalogue, which is essentially material over 18 months old. But for 12 years I was doing frontline Marketing Management, looking after UK bands and international acts, marketing them in the UK and breaking them, or not breaking them! I did a lot of work for Epic which is a Sony/BMG label, from 1990-2002. I worked a really broad roster of artists including Motorhead, The Stranglers, The Godfathers, New Model Army, Headswim and we signed The Lightening Seeds, who we probably had most success with in marketing terms. Then International Acts I’ve worked with include Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath who I’ve worked with for years, Pearl Jam, Korn and Screaming Trees.

SISSY: Can you describe what your job entails? Legend has it that being a marketing man involves lots of cocaine and a huge expense account!

NEIL: Those were the glory days! That sort of thing doesn’t really happen any more in these frugal times. Basically, the best way of summing up what the marketing manager does is… they are the product manager for their roster of artists within the company. So that means that if they are the marketing person for an act, they are totally responsible for managing them through the company. In the first instance they work with the A&R man who brought the act to the company; hopefully getting to know the band early on, if they’re a live act, going to see them play and generally getting a vision for how they can be marketed. It’s also good to form a relationship with the act’s manager if they have one, help find a booking agent and get a good team around them. So initially marketing involves being the point of contact between the artist and record company.

Then you would commission a photo shoot, and start to look into getting some artwork ready. One of the great things about this job is that all the acts are so different; you’re not dealing with marketing baked beans and putting tins on a shelf, you’re dealing with creative human beings who have all got their own opinions. Some of them are passionately interested in art, some are artists themselves as well as musicians so they contribute a lot. Others may not have a clue or don’t care and need a lot of direction so the marketing manager gets to be more creative. Then it’s about finding the right creative people that the artist will hit it off with. The next stage involves scheduling a release date for the first single, then the album or whatever releases have been decided upon. Then you’d be looking at commissioning and making a video. Next the cds and covers have to be physically made. For radio, you need to get a radio promo package together, which is part of what the marketing department does in conjunction with the promotions and PR people who may be within the company or outside agencies employed by the act. The marketing man is like a conduit; once an act has been assigned to you, you’re expected to produce all the things the artist needs for radio and tv. After all that comes the actual marketing of the product itself, a lot of which is now online or digital. Then there’s the traditional media like press, radio and tv advertising, which if a project takes off involves making commercials.

SISSY: How does the budget get allocated for an artist?

NEIL: You would sit down and agree one with the MD of the label itself. If you’re breaking a new British band, for example, you would have a figure in mind but that can change very quickly depending on how momentum picks up for the act. The actual amount will vary depending on how much it cost to sign the band, record them. What you’ll find is if you sign a band for around £100,000 you’ll initially have a really decent marketing budget and then if it starts to take off, the budget will increase correspondingly. The budget may have to include tour support of £50,000 depending on the contract, plus around the same again for a video.

SISSY: Is all of that recoupable from the artists’ royalties?

NEIL: Again, it depends on the contract, but as a rule, what we would provide as a major record company would be sales and marketing, press and promotions. But there are other costs above and beyond those that would generally be recoupable.

SISSY: Some bands prefer to employ press and plugging agents outside their record label. Does that cause offence to the in-house departments and result in them not working so hard for the artist?

NEIL: Not usually; it depends who it is. If it’s a good artist having success, everyone obviously wants to be associated with that. People at record companies are no different to the artists in that respect. You do have bands that come with outside press agents, but the more people there are involved within the company, the more exciting it is, which generates good feeling about the band.

SISSY: Have you been a part of any particularly notorious marketing stunts or ploys?

NEIL: The one that springs to mind is when we floated a giant statue of Michael Jackson down the Thames. It was to promote the Dangerous album, which had a huge statue of him on the front cover. So we hired a barge and floated it down the river, which got on the national news and in all the papers. What you’re trying to do with something like that, and it’s getting harder and harder, is to create something that generates news, that gets you on to things that money can’t buy like the News at Ten, the front page of the newspaper or radio coverage like mentions on a phone-in show; anything that gets people talking about the band.

SISSY: So what does marketing catalogue entail?

NEIL: It’s kid in a sweetshop time! You get to revisit old albums and remaster, repackage and re-release them. We have a synch department who are looking to place tracks on adverts and soundtracks, and one act that’s enjoyed success recently in that way is The Only Ones, whose track ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ was on the Vodaphone ad. It’s actually my all-time favourite song and I wasn’t sure about it being appropriated for that advert, but the upshot has been that the band has reformed despite saying that hell would freeze over before they would get back together! They are doing some gigs and have loads of festival dates lined up. So we are looking at the 3 albums they recorded for our label as well as all the B sides of the singles and extended remixes. We’ll get lots of photos from the era and maybe get a journalist or someone who understands the band to write an essay on what each album meant and we’ll re-release them around the band reforming.

SISSY: I actually think that part of your job will increase in the future while investment in new bands will decrease because it’s so risky in today’s environment.

NEIL: I think there will always be people who want to buy cds. We’re kind of in a bit of a scared, uncertain stage at the moment where people think it’s all going online or digital, but people like myself who are working with catalogue don’t see that yet. It’s a bit like when vinyl was considered dead by 1992, and now it’s back with a vengence and getting more and more popular. Certainly major record companies have been a bit slow to react to the internet; 7 years ago they were burying their heads in the sand which caused a lot of problems we’re still scrambling to deal with, but I think there’s room for both cd’s and downloads. There’s an enormous population of people in this country who are over 35 and still buy cds. In marketing terms we call him ‘£50 man’… who goes into a record shop and thinks nothing of spending £50 a time on cds. Those people will be buying music for at least another 20 or 30 years. Then there’s a huge ‘grey market’ of pensioners; there’s never been so many pensioners in this country who grew up being into music. The thing to bear in mind is, the music industry is still a very young industry; Elvis was only 50 years ago. The industry has kind of fumbled its way along on gut feeling and it’s never really been based on a great business model. So the interesting thing is, the people who started the industry 50 years ago are all retiring by now and there’s a new breed coming through. If you compare it to the motor car industry or book publishing, the music industry is still changing and no other industry has been through so many changes in such a short space of time, in terms of both styles and formats. I can definitely recommend the book ‘Black Vinyl, White Powder’ by Simon Napier Bell to anyone who wants to discover the heritage of the British music scene and all the changes it’s been through.

SISSY: Lots of artists blame poor sales on inadequate marketing… what’s your opinion on that?

NEIL: The Rolling Stones were the first to do that in about 1964! Their Manager, Andrew Loog Oldham told the band to say in interviews that they hated their record company because it made them look like rebels, more risqué than the Beatles. Bands like Oasis are still doing that today; I think it’s great… it’s how things should be. Otherwise you can get too comfy and complacent. Sure, record companies can make mistakes; the big ones are enormous organisations who have worked out their priorities and may not be able to allocate the type of budget each individual band would ideally want.

SISSY: I have a pet theory, that punk inadvertently created what it set out to destroy; before punk, to be a successful musician you had to learn to play for years so you were really good and possibly be an art college graduate or something as well. Then punk came along and was anti all that. The lesson the industry seemed to learn was that you could take any couple of kids off the street and as long as they had the right hairstyle and cool shoes you could market them and they’d make it. So instead of having to sign drug-addled reprobate punk bands, you could turn a couple of malleable, clean-cut and obedient kids into pop stars. What do you think?

NEIL: It’s funny you say that because I read a brilliant article recently that said the advent of the X Factor could be seen as a terrible side-effect of punk! The essence of punk was that anybody could do it and the legacy of that idea is shows like the X Factor and Pop Idol. The music industry is many things; it is a broad church so you do have things like X Factor or Westlife at the teeny end of it where arguably you can just get a bunch of herberts off the street, stick them together and write some songs for them then promote them in the right way. They are manufactured but that has happened ever since pop was born, and will probably continue to.

SISSY: Do you have any favourite bands at the moment, either musically or in terms of being good fun to promote?

NEIL: I hate this question because I always go completely blank!

SISSY: Personally I really rate the new Arctic Monkeys single… they had that first album hype and massive success and could have easily become a one-hit wonder, but they seem to have learned a lot while they’ve been touring; that if they want to make it on the international rock arena they have to subscribe to the great rock tradition and reference their Sabbath, ACDC and Zep. They seem to have done that with their new single, which is basically intelligent heavy rock without fuzz! So now they can make it in America and Germany… everywhere.

NEIL: That’s true, they’ve been a bit parochial up until now but it looks like they’ve gone broader in their music. But there’s no current bands really grabbing me by the throat. Maybe it’s a wider thing really; I think life in general is quite dull at the moment in terms of all areas of the arts. I don’t think music is any different from the other arts in the respect that it’s kind of waiting for a revolution; that’s where Britain seems to be at the moment. One person I have really liked over the last year or so is Paolo Nutini who I think is fantastic. It’s not the sort of thing I normally gravitate towards but I just think he’s a real talent, a fantastic songwriter and he’s got humour as well.

SISSY: And his voice is quite distinctive. An A&R man once said to me that it’s not important to be a technically good singer, as long as your voice is instantly recognisable as you. For example Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream isn’t a technically good singer but he doesn’t sound like anyone else.

NEIL: It’s the same thing with Ozzy, the Arctic Monkeys, Oasis or Bob Dylan; it’s star quality. I saw Bob Dylan last night and he just kind of drones on but there’s something about him that’s unbelievable and he’s incredibly cool. There’s not enough star quality around in my opinion.

SISSY: Or maybe there is but it isn’t being given an arena in which to develop at the moment?

NEIL: I disagree; I think real stars will always emerge because cream rises to the top.

SISSY: That’s an old political argument; capitalism assumes that cream rises to the top and socialism assumes that scum rises to the top so the weaker elements of society need protecting from the scum. Applied to the music industry, I would say the more left-field artists, less obvious acts, or ‘growers’ need time to develop, something which doesn’t always happen in an instant success or market-driven environment.

NEIL: Being really successful always comes back to the same thing, it’s still all about the song. If you’ve got a good strong song you’ll get there. In a way, I think things were worse in the past when you just had Radio 1 and 2 with strict playlists, and nowhere else to go. Although I think XFM is a prime example of a radio station that’s got it all at its fingertips but only has 500,000 listeners because it still adheres to a playlist and won’t actually go out on a limb and see what people are doing, instead of playing the same few records every hour. They should be broadening their remit and saying ‘here’s a load of new music, it’s really exciting!’ and becoming something that could be really influential, creating an audience that’s willing to be stimulated. XFM doesn’t do that; it goes so far and then it’s just Capital radio all over again.

SISSY: That’s kind of what I’m saying; everything seems to be playing it safe, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Things have to be instantly popular whereas great bands can sometimes be less immediate and more difficult to understand. For example, Led Zeppelin were dismissed in the UK when they first started and had to go to America to become successful. In today’s climate, they wouldn’t have got a record deal.

NEIL: That’s true. REM would never have made it past their second album, even U2 probably would have been dropped! Bands like the Godfathers and Headswim might never have got signed in the first place.

SISSY: You were saying you think the live scene is quite vibrant at the moment, despite the general decrease of revenue in the music industry?

NEIL: I think the live scene has been really vibrant for the last year to 18 months, and even if that is because recorded music sales have decreased, it can only be a good thing. If you’re a musician, that’s what it’s all about; it’s not about sitting in your bedroom recording, it’s about being able to do it live as well.

SISSY: Do you think it’s thriving as in unsigned bands are playing, or do you think that it’s mostly bands who are already in the industry, as in they have management or a deal already?

NEIL: My impression was that at venues like the Barfly, Dublin Castle or the Metro, a lot of it is American bands or more established British bands who can pull a bit of a crowd, which gives unknown bands a chance to support them. Obviously they need to have got to a certain level already or they wouldn’t be given those gigs.

SISSY: Is it true that you have to have a manager these days in order to get taken seriously by a record company?

NEIL: No, that’s not necessarily true; we have signed bands without a manager. In some ways it can be an advantage not to have a manager as there are an awful lot of managers who don’t know what they’re doing and are a pain in the proverbial! There are bands who have a mate representing them at the beginning, and they can be a bit green behind the ears. They might be good at booking local gigs or getting a rehearsal space for the band, but when it gets beyond that, you need someone who knows what they’re doing in order to get to the next level.

SISSY: As a marketing manager, do you have company directives to find a certain amount of bands each year?

NEIL: Certainly, the A&R department are looking for bands all the time. Sony/BMG has just started a new initiative, which is basically a blog page. We’re telling bands and A&R not to send in demos; save the money because it’s all on line now. We’ve got this blogging intiative set up so that if you want to send in your music, you can post it up on the site and we’ll give it a listen. I think about 800 bands have posted stuff so far in the 4 weeks since it started. The addresses are columbiademos.co.uk and rcademos.co.uk…. Columbia and RCA are the 2 frontline labels within Sony/BMG. It’s worth checking out; there’s a social networking aspect to the site as well and blogs by people at the record companies saying what they are up to at the moment, but the main objective is to attract artists who want to get signed. It got some good press when it first launched.

SISSY: How did you get started in this career?

NEIL: There was an awful lot of luck involved; it’s not something you can train for. I studied something completely different…Maritime Studies which was completely random! I was interested in shipping and air travel but my passion was always music. When I left university I got a job with HMV and partly enjoyed it because it widened my musical knowledge and I got discount cd’s, but I didn’t really like the retail environment. I wanted to work with bands or for a record company. I was clearly never going to be talented enough to go on stage so I decided I would have to live my live vicariously through other people who could. So I joined CBS in their telesales department with a view to getting into marketing. I wanted to work for them because I loved the Stranglers and they were on CBS. Luckily enough I had a really good manager who saw my enthusiasm and gave me a chance. So I worked my way up, plus I was lucky.

SISSY: Who are your favourite bands of all time?

NEIL: As I said before, I love the Stranglers, but my musical appreciation is so much wider now; when I started I was a bit blinkered. I think the way people consume music now is so different to 20 years ago. When I was a kid it was more tribal; you were a punk or a skinhead or a mod. If you didn’t have the right shirt on you’d get beaten up! It’s not like that any more because everybody likes a bit of rap and a bit of rock or indie. There just aren’t those divisions now.

SISSY: Can you give any advice to people wanting to work in the music industry?

NEIL: The only bit of advice I’ve ever given to anybody in the 20 years I’ve been doing this is; whatever you’re doing, do it well. If you get your head down and do things well, someone will notice. And if you show enthusiasm and an aptitude, people pick up on that. in the music industry, people thrive on enthusiasm because it’s all about vibe and gut instinct. We can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds marketing things, but it’s more about the visceral feeling than logic. So if you want to get into the industry on any level, if you get an opportunity, just seize it and give it your all and it will be recognised!