As part of Swn Festival (pronounced ‘Soon’) in Cardiff this weekend, I was on a panel discussing independent and DIY music business in the digital age. One of the questions asked (and it comes up a lot) was about whether localism and local scenes still play an important role in music.
It had been a very orderly and polite seminar up until that moment, and so when the music-manager-for-bands-you’ve-heard-of answered in the negative, citing the globalising impact of the internet as his evidence, I took the opportunity to be a bit provocative, and piped up with “you’re very wrong”.
But before I get to my main point, I’d like to tell three short stories of recent live music events and how a little bit of local knowledge changes everything.
1) Here we are – where is everyone?
A band from my homeland of New Zealand turned up to play in Birmingham. Amazing band, amazing gig and they put on a show that would have delighted a stadium, a festival or a packed large venue.
The venue capacity was only a few hundred – and there was something like 60 people in the audience.
All of them had a great time – but it could have been much better with a big crowd in the room.
Now, I have to say – this band really appreciated their crowd, thanked them (especially the Brits) for turning up to support them – shared their bottle of vodka from the front of the stage and gave their all. It was superb showmanship all around, but in the grand scheme of things, it was mostly hidden from view.
The point is that this was not a failure of marketing and promotion – but the lack of one important piece of information that only a local could really have told them.
They are not a band for an inner-city venue in Birmingham. They belong in Kings Heath – a smallish village in South Birmingham, but with massive support for bands of this ilk. A night at the Hare and Hounds would have been utterly packed to the rafters, well supported, profitable and laser-accurately targeted.
It would also have started a buzz about this band that would have spread like wildfire through the city.
2) Where are we everyone?
As it happens, another band from my homeland of New Zealand played in Birmingham the following night. These guys are far more established internationally and are pretty much guaranteed to pack out any venue you care to put them in throughout Europe.
There’s a gag that our fellow countrymen Flight of the Conchords use in their live performances. In front of a packed theatre crowd, Jemaine calls out “Good evening…” (looks at the back of his guitar) “…New York!”
That’s kind of funny, right? Sadly, this particular band didn’t take those precautionary steps – and addressed the Birmingham crowd as ‘Hello Bristol!” (yikes…).
We’re a forgiving lot, us Brummies – but some towns would have taken great offense at such a slight. I mean – easy mistake to make when you’re touring the world playing venue after venue, night after night – but not a good mistake to make. Like calling out the wrong name during sex – only, y’know, in a live music situation.
Even when you’re in venue after venue, night after night – the simple fact is that to everyone facing towards the stage, this is the one concert they’re attending. It has to feel like the most important night of the tour – the favourite city.
3) Here we are, everyone!
I attended the Swn Festival in Cardiff, Wales this weekend. A lot of bands I’d never heard of. A couple I had. Some good, some great and some really amazing.
But the ones who really made a mark were not necessarily the most competent or most polished bands. In fact, one of my favourites were a teen punk band that just threw everything they had at what they did (watch out for The Stilletoes).
But equally, there were some acts who turned up, knew they were buzz of the industry and played to rooms full of scene kids and A&R men. And good on them. But they were just doing what they do.
And then there were the bands who weren’t just performing – they were performing in Cardiff.
English bands who learned how to say ‘Good evening Cardiff!’ (Noswaith dda Caerdydd!) or ‘thanks very much!’ (diolch yn fawr iawn!) in Cymraeg. Bands that made local references in their banter. Bands that had clearly been working the local fanbase through their MySpace, website, mailing list and contacts.
And then there were the bands who won the crowd over with their unique brand of Welsh-ness.
Derwyddon Dr Gonzo – a nine-piece ska/afrobeat/klezmer/funk band primarily consisting of a horn section, and singing exclusively in the Welsh language – were clear crowd favourites. I’m hoping to see them at festivals further afield.
The music is universal – but the band is part of a local pride and a local scene (supported by local radio, which is important – but that’s a rant for another day) that guarantees an enthusiastic and grateful crowd that blows us out-of-towners away.
And that’s significant – because besides the local residents, music lovers and gig-goers – city festivals like Swn also draw influential music industry types from elsewhere (in this case, notably, London).
Is localism important?
People make sense of music in a number of different ways. Of course, genre is important. But music is also often tribal: clothing, piercings, the bars you go to – all of these things speak to identity. See a teenager on the street, and you’re likely to be able to take a decent guess about what they have on in their headphones.
And scenes develop in places. Just as the South Birmingham scene I mention in my first example embraces a mix of reggae, soul, funk, hip hop, and related genres of music, other areas of the city organise around different sorts of music – without being restricted to a specific single genre.
Music – particularly (though not exclusively) live music – is a social affair. People share tastes, they see each other at the same events and start to develop friendships – or at least that kind of recognition that says ‘you’re one of us’. Scenes have opinion leaders and taste makers, focal points (eg: particular venues and record stores) that may not be immediately obvious to the outsider.
Audiences are not large numbers of individuals that act individually – they are groups of people that act as groups. Understand them, treat them well – become part of them – and they will be a far more powerful support and advocate than any single ‘user’.
Moral of the story: If you have, or are part of, a local music scene – feed it. Make it a key part of your activities, and the backbone of your outreach as a music enterprise.
If you are going to another town, make an effort to learn about local scenes. Do a bit of research. Find record labels, independent record stores, other artists that may be able to offer advice and insider tips that will help you understand the unique characteristics of the town you’re turning up in.
Tune your performance to the local scene. Get some local knowledge behind you – a spot of language, a point of local pride or topical item to drop into your banter. Anything that will make the audience get that you care.
Appeal to the group’s sense of its own scene – and you’ll make a lasting impression on whatever town you find yourself in.
And yes, of course you can use the internet to do this sort of research and make these kinds of connections. That is what it’s there for.
1 Trackbacks
You can leave a trackback using this URL: http://newmusicstrategies.com/2008/11/16/is-localism-important/trackback/
[...] READ THE FULL STORY [...]
15 Comments
I think a lot of it comes down to showing an interest in your audience. When I saw Elbow at the local club last week, Guy Harvey (thankfully) did not try speak Dutch, but he quickly established a rapport with the audience and made sure that everyone was having a good time. That connection, I think, is most important… knowing about the local scene and customs is but one way to help yourself establish that connection.
Hi,
I found out about your website through a BBC radio show that played my latest release and also recommended this website. I’m glad they did; nice website, good and useful info (also in this particular article).
cheers mate!
Turtuga Blanku
*Solar Power Music* at: http://www.TurtugaBlanku.com
Localism *is* important no doubt and playing to the home crowd is always a booster for any band. If a band can’t create a buzz at a small place they can call home by regularly playing there then chances of them making a buzz everywhere else are pretty slim too.
Local is a tricky one to define in London though, my bandmates are from all over the city so we don’t have a fixed geographical area which we can call local…but we do have one venue we like to keep constant as our home turf. I guess we can call that our local scene. On the other hand most London gigs are “bring an audience” type gigs so local means wherever you can take your fans.
Thanks for the insight though, it’s made me think of what “local” means to our band in the London context.
Atul
http://www.donkeybox.co.uk
Hi Andrew
Paul Carr here – the guy who arranged the SWN seminars at ATRiuM in partnership with the Welsh Music Foundation, John Rostron, and Radio 1’s Huw Stevens. Just to say that I very much enjoyed your session, and totally agree that a degree of local knowledge is imperative for up and coming bands, especially those playing in a new town. However, as an ex professional musician of many years, this is something that has always been the case. Due to the lack of understanding of some promoters and agents, developing artists can sometimes get placed into inappropriate venues, but certainly (in my professional musician days at least), we would always learn from these mistakes and attempt to appropriate the local knowledge into the next visit. Although the internet has gone someway to break down some of these barriers by enabling audiences to check out non local bands prior to their arrival, I still have the (old fashioned?) view that unless you appropriate the local – you will not have long standing success in the global. I realise this is a somewhat traditional view, and modern record companies have the ability to circumnavigate this. There was in fact an interesting seminar with ‘Scouting For Girls’ just prior to yours, and much of their discussion when analysing their success was centred around understanding and appreciating local audiences/fans – as it is these that launch a career. In fact it was gratifying to see they have not lost touch of this, and their picture outside of the ATRiuM building to me represents the now global brand of SFG juxterpositioned against the ‘local’ university building (see http://news.glam.ac.uk/news/en/2008/nov/14/scouting-girls-atrium/). Living in Wales, I often have discussions with students about the identity of being Welsh, and they often quite rightly portray a sense of pride of the Welshness of bands such as ‘The Steriophonics’, ‘The Manic Street Preachers’, and ‘The Lost Prophets’ (the latter are particular important to local University of Glamorgan students as they are from Treforrest). Being a contentious Geordie, I will often reply by asking them to identify the ‘Welshness’ of these bands now they have become more global, and like to compare them to ‘Maximo Park’ – because “at least they have retained the regional Geordie accents! To conclude, I say the Randy Brecker band at the Brecon Jazz festival a few years back, and his opening words were “hello England” (I kid not)! After a few boo’s and sarcastic comments from the audience the music had the final word.
Cheers
Paul
Hi,
I’m the founder of a recently launched social network http://www.ooizit.com, a social network dedicated to exposing new unsigned UK music artists.
When creating ooizit.com it was our primary focus to make the site as local as possible in order to help promote local, UK music. Our first release of the site has a region breakdown e.g. East Midlands; however, as the network grows this will get even more granular as we’re already getting a lot of requests for Cities to be included.
Having previously work in the NPD division of the Daily Mail Group designing and implementing digital strategies, I have personally conducted numerous user tests to analyse the importance of all things “local”, and can conclude that as users continue to demand more from their online experience, the more relevant, local and detailed the content they can consume the better.
Great site by the way!
Tom
I was thinking about this problem about locality and authenticity vs. the opportunities of a global approach.
A discussion on Twitter Music Think Tank (http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/twitter-is-radically-changing-the-way-musicians-are-building.html) was the trigger for me and I planned to do a blogpost about it, but I’ll start with this comment.
People told me that I shouldn’t worry about local European or Belgian followers on Twitter and that I should think globally.
Fine, but the first problem is language. My mother tongue is Dutch, and not English (a problem many English natives don’t think about). Until recently I twittered in Dutch, because it’s easier for me to write witty, catchy status updates in Dutch. Not because I am awfully bad in English. I’m really very sensitive to good language and writing, and that’s why I feel that I cannot bring the subtleties which I master in Dutch writing into an English text.
The second thing is connectivity and authenticity. At this moment, most people who follow me, also speak Dutch. This is certainly true because I post my updates simultaneously to FaceBook and Twitter via Ping.fm. It’s a little bit ‘fake’ that I speak to them in English (which I do now, most of the time). Wouldn’t this make them to disconnect?
Some things are just too local for other people to understand. Last week I wrote the following comment “Hilke heeft stramme spieren van de boekenbeurs af te breken.” First I need a dictionary to translate this into English. I know “spieren” are “muscles”, but “stram”? In the dictionary I find “stiff joints” would be a good translation. But the sound and alliteration of “stramme spieren” is something I lose in the translation… What a pity! Next is “boekenbeurs”. This is a book fair, which has a really big appeal in my region. It is the biggest event for writers, publishers and book lovers in Flanders. Thus, in English this would be “Stiff joints after taking down the book fair”. But this is completely pointless. In the Dutch version this makes people curious, because Boekenbeurs is something they can relate to and they’ll wonder what I was doing there (As a matter of fact, my employer, a small organisation for writers, had an nice stand there, an oriental hotel searching voor 1001 love letters. I helped taking down all the boards of the construction and carrying al the stuff into the van).
To conclude, this is my dilemma: should I address an international audience and write things that cannot go as deep into elements of my specific environment, culture, etc.? Or should I stick to my local, Dutch-speaking core audience, where I can show more authenticity, linguistic cleverness and relate to ‘insider’s information’?
In the near future I will experiment with both…
You can always follow me:
http://www.twitter.com/colorlessgreen
http://mmmotion.wordpress.com (blog about music promotion, in Dutch, soon I will experiment in English)
http://colorlessgreenideas.wordpress.com (blog about my band, in Dutch)
In the meantime I further elaborated on this issue on my blog:
http://mmmotion.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/should-i-go-international/
All the best, Hilke
I would always advise a young up-and-coming band to keep it local to start with. Local is where friends, family and hardcore fans are. It’s where your favourite local indie record shops, fashion shops, coffee houses, pubs, nightclubs and venues are. And where you can team-up with bands of the same genre, support a charity, get in the press and wow the locals by radio. To say “local is important”, is an underestimate.
What’s local?
Get a map, find your favourite local venue (the venue you like and play most), draw a circle around it with a radius of about 25 miles (about 40 kilometres) – That’s local, or it should be!
“What’s local?
Get a map, find your favourite local venue (the venue you like and play most), draw a circle around it with a radius of about 25 miles (about 40 kilometres) – That’s local, or it should be!”
Errr that’s not so simple in some London areas. Drawing a 25 mile radius around Camden will cover a population that is bigger than all of Sweden!
“Errr that’s not so simple in some London areas. Drawing a 25 mile radius around Camden will cover a population that is bigger than all of Sweden!”
Yes that’s very true Atul.
25 miles represents the distance people would be prepared to travel to see an unsigned band in the UK. Because of the transport infrastructure and people’s familiarity with commuting, one can draw a 35 mile radius around a London venue (same in most large cities). Bands who operate in large cities have a big advantage! Of course you don’t have to target “everyone”, just those who, like Andrew said, fall within your local scene.
I find it odd that a new band who is working within an area of about 1963 square miles, and a population of say 5 million, has time to worry about expanding out to the rest of the world ;)
Hmm… looks like I also provide some solid evidence to support the ‘Geography don’t matter‘ thesis as well:
The Coincidence
Hi unsigned band promotion,
Believe it or not I have found it easier to target people via communities on facebook and last.fm rather than playing live. And more of our real fans are people who we’ve never met! The people who turn up to see us play live are usually our circle of friends and of course the circle of friends of other bands who are there.
Which sort of brings me to the same minefield of an issue…it is silly for us to try and conquer all of the London scene. I’m open to suggestions though.
Hi Atul,
Unfortunately it’s not always what is easiest!
I think Andrew has it absolutely right, and he’s articulated it very well too, much better that I can :(
Identifying who your fans are is key, you know who these people are though, they’re people like you. They hang out in the same colleges & universities, indie record shops, fashion shops, coffee houses, clubs, pubs and nightclubs that you do (I’ve already said that above, I think), they live next door, they listen to the same music and they want to dance like you, and you want to dance like them! They’re your friends, or they could be. You know where they are, what they want and how to approach them. *I don’t*
As Andrew said, you can use networking communities and your websites to communicate with the locals – that’s what the internet is for.
Also, don’t forget a band is a business, with few sources of income, live performance is an important one because it also leads to: music sales (CD physical), merchandising (video, T-shirts, badges, hats, sheet music/songbook, etc.). Does or can the average indie band produce enough product to make a fan spend £90 per annum for five years? For me, local is so important, as I think you will not get that commitment from ‘fans’ on facebook. Go conquer London.
ian
Thanks for your advice Ian and I appreciate your time in this input. Running the band like a business is really important and so far I haven’t approached it this way. I’ve been struggling to get a sustained turnout at gigs and locally expand beyond our social friend base. At least I don’t have the problem of sustaining the band itself which is where I see many bands at the starting line dissolve.
But setting commercial targets and milestones on paper will give something to aim for and having a campaign for London is a whole load better than not having a campaign at all! The coming months will be interesting…
I think it’s definitely something that sets you apart. We’ve got this big ass Internet thing, where everybody is everywhere, so it’s hard to compete there. One thing you can’t get online though is LOCAL.
This means local radio, local TV, local message forums, and local print media will flourish even more.
I think that’s very exciting. We’ve gotten away from this is recent years, with syndicated radio stations like Jack and cable television.