Missoula News

Do-It-Yourself-Promotion

Myspace, Missoula Style

By Mark Maher, 12-05-06

Snippets of hip-hop and rock blast down the hallway from his cracked-open door. Inside, band posters plastered along the walls add to the scruffy-bed, stale-beer stench, and general reckless abandonment rocker ambiance to which he’s clearly aspiring. Alone, he stares as if in a trance, moving only to re-hydrate with another swig of a warm Pabst Blue Ribbon beer or command another click of the mouse, to take him to another place, in his space. Chad Ekergen, bass player for local Missoula band LP and the Federales, is doing what all good band members these days are doing in their spare time. He’s networking on MySpace.

Ekergen, like hundreds of other Missoula musicians, is on board the digital music revolution, which has exploded across the country. Bands that only a few years ago had little if any chance of making it out of their grandma’s garage are re-inventing the way music is listened to, sold, marketed and packaged. MySpace and YouTube are just two of dozens of Web sites that have shaped their digital music revolution.

“There is a seamless connection between bands and venues," says Mike Gill, local promoter of the Raven Café and guitar and vocalist for Missoula locals Victory Smokes.

“Why do you need a booking agent?” he asks.

The Old School

Just a few years ago things weren’t seamless at all. Bands that weren’t on labels were booking all their own tours by painstakingly phoning up dozens of bars and music venues looking for a gig. Shane Hickey, member of veteran Missoula band the Volumen, remembers how in the late '80s and early '90s every punk band had a thick magazine, published by Maximum Rock and Roll, called Book Your Own Fucking Life. The magazine, or “Bible” as Hickey puts it, was a must-have for any touring band. It listed thousands of venues and their contact information across America. However, as the Volumen and others bands found out the hard way, the venues listed in the magazine weren’t always good venues. Hickey remembers a cowboy bar in Lubbock, Texas, they booked on the Volumen's 1993 tour that was listed in the magazine. The bar’s crowd was hostile toward the Volumen. Hickey remembers the bar's owner asking him in a slow Texas drawl, “What kinda band doesn’t bring a PA?" He later found out that other punk bands had it even worse at the Lubbock bar. Members of a fellow punk band, Ancient Chinese Penis, were beat up after performing a regular part of their show, which included stripping naked on stage. These days, you know a lot more about the venues you will be playing. The dialogue created on MySpace via e-mails and comments posted back and forth between bands and booking agents allows bands to anticipate what a show will be like before they get there. “With MySpace you talk directly to the booking agent," Hickey says.

MySpace, Missoula Style

	Canadian MC Josh Martinez performing at the Loft to a packed crowd in early November.

Today, bands look up a city on MySpace to search for venues and to find bands with a similar style to play with. Venues too, are searching for bands that are, or will be, on tour in their area with a sound that will fit their venue’s style.

“For a touring band not to be on MySpace is suicide,” says Hickey.

The Victory Smokes' November 2006 tour included shows in Washington, Idaho and Montana, all booked through MySpace. “Shows come from both ends,” says Gill, who explained how contacts he made for their tour were readily available on MySpace, as opposed to the “old days,” when “several calls were needed to get anything done.”

So venues and musicians are finding new ways to hook up and put on shows in the same clubs, bars and garages they have for years. Not so revolutionary, you might say. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, which is melting rapidly, exposing new models and ideas of how bands should package their music.

Upset with loss of energy and atmosphere that can be found only at live shows, Mark and Andrea Heimer, who make up the former Missoula band No-Fi Sole Rebellion, have taken it upon themselves to re-invent the way they their music is experienced with the help of MySpace and the video-sharing Web site YouTube. No-Fi Sole Rebellion is currently looking to host a virtual tour with the Volumen and others, which includes live video recordings from several bands packaged together into one online digital experience. It will be shown on their Web site and possibly their MySpace page. Several participating bands' music videos will be imported onto YouTube and then embedded back on No-Fi Sole Rebellion’s MySpace page for fans to watch as a live digital show.

YouTube vs. MySpace

	Victory Smokes performing at The Raven Cafe in Spring 2006. Mike Gill (left) Patrick Gill, Ben Miller and Tony Matts make up Missoula locals Victory Smokes.

YouTube, which has been around only since February 2005, uses Adobe Flash technology to display streaming video, which means you don't have to download it to watch it, and thus you can view it immediately without using much space on your computer. The company, which was recently purchased by Google for more than $1.6 billion, has a goal to host every video on earth for anyone to view free of charge. “It’s friggin’ simple to use,” Hickey says.

Hickey started uploading music videos he made for the Volumen three months ago. He plans to upload more videos shot on special Russian Super8 stop motion cameras by former Missoula Independent arts editor Andy Smetanka during the band’s European tour. The videos are reminiscent of "The Wonder Years" home video clips from the opening credits of the show. Unlike its future digital cousin, the Super8 is shot frame by frame on film, which adds a scratchy and eerie feel due to its “weird timing and weird color," Hickey says.

YouTube accepts common mpeg or avi files that you upload to the site, much like you would a photo or an e-mail attachment. YouTube then re-encodes and publishes it to the site within a few hours for the whole world to see. Before videos are uploaded, “tags” are added -- key words that help locate your video during a search. For example, some of Hickey's tags are "Volumen," "nerd," "rawk," "Missoula," "indie," and "rad." A person who types one of these tags into YouTube’s search engine will find Hickey’s videos. However, with hundreds of thousands of videos and no particular niche, YouTube isn’t quite the music Mecca that MySpace is. “Its hard to tell who is watching. ... Bands are the last thing they are looking for,” Hickey says. He went on to explain how YouTube is most commonly used for viewing the extremely weird and hilarious. For example, one of the most watched videos one recent day was an excerpt from a Kevin Federline reality show that catches him reading a text message from his wife Britney Spears, which she sent to allegedly dump him. The difference in networking on YouTube versus MySpace, Hickey says, is that “after a show we can expect at least seven to 10 friend requests on MySpace … everyone knows to go to MySpace.”

	Missoula locals, LP and The Federales performing at the Loft in Downtown Missoula in early November.

Shameless MySpace Self-Promotion Tips

Keeping a list of upcoming shows for friends to check out is one of many ways to promote your band on MySpace. Posting bulletins of upcoming shows, release parties, and other events to all of your MySpace friends is another sure-fire way to stay on your fans’ radar. However, still the most popular form of shameless MySpace self-promotion is adding someone as your friend, which allows you to post comments on his or her Web page with easy links back to your own page. This type of interactivity on MySpace may be the key to its success. Before MySpace, fans would really only be able to keep up with bands through their Web sites, if they had one, let alone a good one, which requires money most bands don’t have. Today, fans have a completely interactive experience keeping tabs on their favorite bands through MySpace. Fans can email the band itself, post a comment for other fans to see, listen to music, download selected songs, or watch a video all with a click of a mouse. Moreover, such simplicity and the free use of MySpace makes it possible for even the band to use. This saves the band money and adds a freshness and liveliness to its MySpace pages that is absent in many band Web sites that are designed and updated by professionals. John Fleming, member of Missoula’s veteran band The Oblio Joes and owner of Ear Candy Music shop, explains that his band has a Web site, but now has a MySpace page. “More people use MySpace,” says Fleming, who checks his MySpace page up to three times a day for fan comments and friend requests. “It’s interactive on both ends," Fleming says.

Smart, Simple MySpace Marketing

Coleman Menke, band manager of Missoula’s LP and The Federales, is one step ahead in the promotion and marketing game. Before playing shows outside of town, like the Federales' last date in Billings, Montana, Menke did a MySpace search for rock bands in Billings. He eventually found Jared Birtchell, a solo indie rock singer/songwriter. Menke liked Birtchell's music, which had a sound similar to that of his own band. Menke contacted Birtchell on MySpace via e-mail and asked him to open for The Federales' upcoming show at The Railyard in Billings and paid him to promote the show. “That way they actually do the work,” says Menke, who can’t do the groundwork of promoting from outside of town. Menke then faxed posters and handbills for the local band to pick up and distribute. Distributing the handbills and plastering posters on every street corner around town, along with bringing in a sizeable crowd with the local band, is a solid recipe for a good show. All of this creative marketing and promotional work is made possible through the simplicity of networking with other bands on MySpace.

“Making It” With The Help Of MySpace

Sure, all this cutting edge promotion talk is exciting, as is the networking phenomenon of MySpace, but is anyone in Missoula actually cutting out the middle man -- record labels -- and making it on their own?

Well, you have to look at what “making it” means. If "making it" is topping the charts without a record deal, on a single mp3, like former rapper-turned-soul-singer Gnarls Barkley did this year with his hit single “Crazy,” then Missoula’s bands definitely are not making it. However, if going on tour and playing your music with different bands at endless venues for the price of gas, beer, and food is “making it,” then Missoula’s rockers are indeed “making it.”

“Bands still want to sign with a label,” says Gill. A label can absorb all the high costs inherent in touring and promoting music. However, major labels like BMG and Sony that just 10 years ago boasted huge profits for their media conglomerate owners are now struggling to stay profitable. The 2006 forecast from the industry group, Technology, Media and Telecommunications headlines: “The Digital Music Revolution has only just started.” The TMT predicts that by the end of the year, 20 percent of the music industry's revenue will come from digital music sites alone. The decline of the once fat-cat music labels has led to bands seeking other options to sell their music. Hip hop and certain rock bands have done increasingly better on the thousands of independent labels out there that have made up more than 20 percent of album sales so far this year. “MySpace has made it much easier for small bands to get their foot in the door,” Gill says. Most bands, like Victory Smokes and LP and the Federales hope to make it popular on MySpace and then eventually hook up with a label, like Arcade Fire did after gaining a large following on MySpace.

As I write this, there are 29 shows within 20 miles of me, according to my MySpace search for “shows in your area.” Shows are at the usually spots like The Loft in downtown Missoula or at The Other Side, but thye're also at smaller venues like the Boys and Girls Club. So, at the very least, MySpace and other sites like it seem to be fueling the fire of new music, new art, and new ideas for Missoulians. “It forges a nice community… that enables us to hear each other’s music,” says Hickey.

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