Building A Scene: On The Ground and Online
You want to go see a show.
You peruse the upcoming acts at your local venues and decide that not only is there little in common from one band to the next, but a lot of the bands just don’t seem very good.
So then, how do you go about finding the good bands? It’s taken me years to find a small group of great local rock bands, and I’m heavily entrenched in the industry. Sure, there are sites that showcase independent music, but rarely with a combination of quality control, genre and geographical specifications.
Even if you dedicate an entire evening, do you have the time and energy to filter through garage recordings of mediocre songs to find the band that actually keeps you from incessantly clicking “next?”
Then, if you do happen to stumble upon one, are they playing anywhere worth going to?
How much are the tickets?! Oh, and there’s no parking. Great.
What else is going on? Oh, Seinfeld re-runs. Cool.
LA hard rock band Socionic
While I agree that Seinfeld re-runs are pretty fantastic, a great local rock show is an entirely unique event. Unlike a stadium show (which also has the potential to be amazing), you can get right up to the stage, stand in front of sonic art; musicians that you can talk to and interact with after the show.
The immediacy, the raw emotion, the intimacy and the energy, the bright lights and the searing sounds all aggressively take hold. The thump of the bass in your chest, the tearing guitars, the singers breath, the crushing drums, all in second to second frames; you scream because you can’t contain yourself, you laugh, you jump, you elbow strangers. The night flies by, broken only by the pauses between bands — enough time to get a drink and stand in line for a bathroom that has you contemplating the shrubs you saw outside.
You lose yourself in a sensory waterfall, and come out feeling emotionally and physically drained. If this sounds overly romanticized, then you haven’t seen an amazing local rock show.
If you live in LA, I am not surprised. I have lived here eight years and seen two.
As a hard rock fan and artist, I decided to pull some instruments and intellects together to change that.
Before I get into my insidious plan to shift the stagnating paradigm of LA’s local rock scene, however, let me, and the various other players in this scene, paint the picture of how it looks today, and how it needs to change.
PROBLEMS
I call it the revolving door.
Joey Flores, artist and founder of LA-based online radio station, Earbits, elaborates.
“Booking agents at your average [LA] clubs will book the first 4 bands that commit to selling a certain amount of tickets while ignoring the synergy of the bands’ styles and doing nothing at all to promote the shows. Each band brings their obligatory 20-50 people…people come, stay for their band’s set, hear completely different music start up after they’re done, and then have absolutely no reason to stick around.”
Rooftop Revolutionaries
In a nutshell, that’s the scene. It’s a vicious cycle of ineffective promoters, bands feeding into the broken system and fans leaving after one set, feeling uninspired, ultimately pushing them to do anything but go out to a show the next time the opportunity arises.
As an artist, trying to build a fan base and bolster interest in your music through this revolving door is like trying to hold a meeting on a roller coaster. That said, there’s as much of a need for change from my perspective as a fan’s.
“As a concert goer I hate when I am forced to pay to enter a club and see a variety type lineup of mixed genres with no cross over or logic from one act to the next,” says Brian Marshak, producer and guitarist in my hard rock band, Rooftop Revolutionaries.
Michael Meinhart, founder, writer and singer of the hard rock band, Socionic, agrees, adding that L.A. today is lacking that destination venue where you’re guaranteed a night of good music.
“It used to be the Whisky, or Viper Room, where you could just show up, not knowing the bands on the bill and still know it would be a great show, but now it’s not like that anywhere,” he says. “If there was a venue like that, I would know about it, and I would tell my friends, and they would tell theirs. And we would all hang out there and listen to great music.
“The current approach really puts a ceiling on what a venue could be and stunts the growth of organically grown scenes and nights focused on quality and artistic message.”
Quality – that’s another thing – without trusted local taste-makers, the LA hard rock scene seems to have no quality control.
Under the pay-to-play mentality, if you can pay, or at the very least guarantee a certain amount of heads through the door, you can go up on stage and fart into a flute for half an hour, without complaints from the booker. Simple reality: quantity over quality.
I have seen many a terrible band perform on stage because they managed to drag their friends along, or because their parents paid for that time slot.
Bookers make the claim that they have to worry about the bottom line above all else because people don’t come to shows anymore. The bills have to be paid and fans just aren’t showing up.
Well why should they?! You give them absolutely no reason to!
The revolving door of obligatory friends and family will never equal (monetarily or socially) a night of complementary bands who work together to promote, bringing their fans for an entire night, not a half hour, of good quality music.
“Booking agents fail to see that they are the first gatekeeper, and by allowing shitty bands to pay to earn their way destroys the logic that good bands deserve good time slots and good nights. This in turn forces fans to much indecision and ultimately, a reason to do something other than go out and see local acts,” says Marshak.
So, if booking agents aren’t connecting fans with quality bands, why not go to the source and create the kind of night you want – for your bands, and your fans?
Brian Marshak considered this question a while ago and began booking entire nights for our band, Rooftop Revolutionaries, hand picking other local bands that would fit the bill, creating an entire night of cohesive and good music. He, like many others, saw it as the obvious move.
Malaki (Josh at left)
“Most band leaders could and should replace most booking agents because they know the ’scene‘ better and who would work well with who.”
Josh Buma, founder and guitarist of the hard rock band, Malaki (who we’ve booked on two of our nights) agrees, citing a recent example of his own: “We recently played a [Sunset] Strip venue where bands were booked by the venues. Nothing matched. None of the other bands’ fans would like us, and vice versa. The only way to successfully book local shows is if the bands themselves do it.”
He continues, breaking it down in an LA-friendly step program:
“Step 1, don’t let venues book your band unless you’re opening for a national act. Step 2, whoever books local shows, make sure each band not only draws, but kicks ass. Kicking ass is not as subjective as one might think.”
Michael John Adams, bassist in Opus Dai, puts it another way: “Those of us in bands know a good band when we hear one. And when we find a good band, we want to book shows with them!”
The logic is simple. “With like bands working together, there becomes more of a collective and cohesive resonance to the events. One that exudes energy felt by the bands as well as the fans…” says Meinhart.
In other words, “What is good for one band is good for all bands on the bill. Pack the club. Everybody will win, from the bands, to the club, to most importantly, the fans,” adds Marshak.
SOLUTIONS
Since booking our own shows, Rooftop Revolutionaries, has seen the benefits both online and in person. Even something as simple as creating one event page on Facebook that includes all the bands for the night as opposed to four separate ones, can make a significant difference in turnout and online interaction.
Soundrop is a social “listening room” music service that launched as an app on Spotify.
Fans want to be introduced to new good music. They’ve already heard your band, they already like your band. Give them something new, show them where to look for other good music in your genre, and the cross promotion from other bands will bring you more fans as well.
This idea of introducing fans to more good music in my scene (hard rock) served as the foundation for my current scheme with the audio app, Soundrop.
It began as a conversation over a cup of coffee in Downtown LA. My fellow Swede and Spotify tech friend asked me to think of ideas on how Spotify could work better with and for independent bands. I jumped at the chance.
While researching and exploring the digital soundscape of Spotify, I happened upon one of their apps, Soundrop. I was immediately struck by the simplistic yet unique layout of this app. For those of you not familiar, the basic gist is that Soundrop hosts a variety of “rooms” based on artist, genre, and themes (working out, chilling, falling asleep, etc.). Listeners have the ability to create their own rooms as well, or add to existing rooms.
What began as me uploading tracks to the Soundrop “Rock” room gradually became a digital blueprint for pushing the LA hard rock scene out of the dark ages.
This concept also tackles one of my issues with Spotify — that there’s no obvious pathway to “underground” or “unsigned” artists. The homepage is reserved for artists you’ve already heard of and it would take you a week’s supply of espresso red eyes and Mother Theresa style patience to eventually find good quality unsigned bands.
Soundrop had a similar issue. Even though listeners, such as myself, could add whatever music I wanted to the rock channel, so can everyone else. You can see where this is going.
When sitting in a playlist of hundreds of songs, not even categorized by ‘type of rock,’ my uploaded track quickly got lost somewhere between Imagine Dragons and the end of the world. Not to mention that this lack of quality control ups the quantity of disjointed rock far past the point where fans are willing to look for new music.
After spinning off bullet point after bullet point of ideas for Spotify, I decided to dig deeper into Soundrop.
I created the channel, “LA Unsigned Rock,” and uploaded what I felt to be the best local LA hard rock. After sending notices to these bands, posting about the channel and including it in our band’s newsletter, I wasn’t thrilled with the performance of my new creation.
It just sat there at the top of my Soundrop landing page, unbeknownst, it seemed, to anyone but me.
So, I reached out to Soundrop, a Norwegian company with offices in LA.
I connected with their VP of Marketing and Communications, Thomas Ford. And later, at a comfortable little cafe on Fairfax, I poured my ideas out onto the table.
Soundrop is in the process of building and bettering their platform, so Thomas was open to ideas that will not only help local bands (monetarily and socially) but that will direct fans and listeners to their app, knowing that Soundrop has a unique and unusual handle on the local unsigned music scenes.
The next week, he put the LA Unsigned Rock channel on Soundrop’s home page. Within two days, the channel had gone from 11 visits to over 1,000.
I reached out to more friends and bands with this newfound inspiration, adding more listeners, more fans and some new bands I discovered. Now, fans are engaging, listening, suggesting bands and appreciating the new ones. And bands are enjoying the sense of community. Promoters…what promoters?
Even in its short life span, this Soundrop room has proved a useful tool for fixing a broken scene.
“In Opus, we’ve spent so much time in our studio over the last couple years working on new material that we’ve lost touch with the LA scene a bit,” Adams says.
“To amend this, we’ve been refreshing our list of local bands that we feel are a good fit with our sound. The “LA Unsigned Hard Rock” Soundrop channel has allowed us to expand that list quite a bit. As I was listening to the channel, I thought to myself (more than once), ’Why haven’t I heard of these guys before??’”
The channel, as of now, has 23 tracks from local LA hard rock bands.
There is quality control; not just anyone can add tracks as they please. They have to be suggested and confirmed by the room manager.
Thomas and I are working on the monetization of Soundrop: holding Soundrop concerts that feature the bands in that room, adding links to buy music after a certain number of listens, adding PSA-style commercials from the bands themselves to pepper into the channel.
Ideas such as these are moving forward, catalyzing help and input from various other players in the scene, not least of all the response I got for this article.
Opus Dai
Musicians want to be part of a scene, and get understandably excited when they see an opportunity to move their music forward. As Meinhart more eloquently put it, “We are more effective and poignant when standing together.”
Adams, from Opus Dai, also inspired by the concept, came forward and offered to help in building a free-standing site for the channel as well.
The site will expand on the idea of the Soundrop room, incorporating band profile pages, an “Angie’s List” type forum of good vs. bad venues and bookers, local music news, a show calendar and more.
Again, it’s a way to allow the Soundrop app onto various platforms (as in, not just Spotify) while continuing to build and push the local scene, bringing it to the attention of fans who want to hear good music but need a guide to ensure they won’t waste time or money on endless playlists or pointless live shows. This platform can be that fan’s guide.
“…a place where fans could trust and go in order to find out about quality bands within a genre that they would be interested in listening to and seeing,” Meinhart envisions.
“Trusted quality aggregators such as this could play a great role in cultivating quality scenes online and eventually in venues.”
It won’t change overnight and there is, as you can see, a lot of work to be done. As a local artist and fan, however, it is easily worth it.
As one final note, I would like to send a challenge to local venues and bookers – not just in LA, but everywhere there is a scene that could use a push.
Here is the challenge: give a shit.
Care about the bands that you put on the bill, spend some time with their music and create a bill that flows, just like we spend time on our set lists and our track listings. Then use the tools you have to promote the hell out of that show in targeted places and to targeted audiences; do your best to make sure the fans stick around between sets.
“Offering a drink discount between bands might make people stick around for the next one,” Flores suggests. Yet he cautions that all your deals and specials “only matter if you book bands that complement the one that played before them.”
Hope to see you all out at the shows. Until then, listen to the playlist here, or check it out below…
Eleanor Goldfield is a Los Angeles-based writer, musician and studio tech. She is lead singer in the hard rock band, Rooftop Revolutionaries, and chief tech at The Village Studios.
