Technology helps bands hit it big

By Frank Ahrens
The Washington Post

MARK SELIGER / THE WASHINGTON POST Steriogram was unknown until a scout discovered the band through its Web site. Now the group has a five-album deal.

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Joe Berman looks for new bands. Typically, that means hanging out in dive bars, enduring hours of unlistenable music by groups whose rock 'n' roll dreams far exceed their talent, praying for the occasional act that shows promise.

About 16 months ago, however, the talent-finder sat at home scouting the globe for groups. He typed "New Zealand indie rock bands" into his computer search engine and found Steriogram, five lads from the town of Whangarei who had a song and a video posted on a Web site but no record contract.

Excited by what he heard, Berman e-mailed Steriogram frontman Brad Carter asking for more music, sparking a swift chain of events. Carter mailed a demo CD, which Berman played for Dan McCarroll, senior creative director for EMI Publishing. Impressed, McCarroll played it for a friend, who happened to be the president of Capitol Records.

Two weeks later, Steriogram had a five-album deal with Capitol, home of the Beatles and Garth Brooks. Now the band is touring the United States and has a video on MTV.

"It's really interesting the way a lot of people are looking for new bands," McCarroll said. "It would be a real Cinderella story if five kids from New Zealand that no one knew made it."

It may be a Cinderella story today, but it could be the norm in coming years. Beset by a drop of more than 30 percent in music sales over the past three years, ongoing piracy, industry consolidation, thousands of layoffs and bottom-line losses in the multimillions of dollars, the music business is searching for novel — and cheaper — ways to find and nurture talent.

For many years bands were discovered in clubs and signed by record labels, with eye-popping advances and massive promotion budgets. But tough times call for tougher deals. The biggest advances are gone and labels are less likely to rubber-stamp the bloated expense accounts of bar-dwelling scouts. Record companies no longer spend thousands to get a new song on big radio stations. The stations themselves can no longer afford to turn over their airwaves to acts that are not proven hit-makers.

All of which opens the door to a new breed of scout like Berman, a Los Angeles-based free-lancer who spends his days trolling the Internet for the next Steriogram — "It's actually what the (talent scouts) who make six figures should have been doing all along," he said — and for new promotion channels, such as satellite radio, to expose new bands to listeners and build the all-important hype.

Even if a band is found by an A&R guy hanging out in a club, as with emerging alt-rockers stellastarr, new technologies let labels and artists end-run traditional promotion channels, such as commercial radio.
 
In May 2003, RCA Records signed New York-based stellastarr to a five-album deal. But five months earlier, deejay Billy Zero broke the band on satellite radio after he got hold of stellastarr's sole CD, recorded on the cheap in New York.

Zero works at XM Satellite Radio in Washington. For about $10 per month, the pay-radio service beams more than 100 channels of music, news, sports and talk to special receivers in cars and homes. Zero runs XM's "Unsigned Bands" channel, which exclusively plays bands that do not have record contracts. When the channel launched, Zero had to solicit CDs from unsigned bands. Now, he receives 50 to 100 CDs a day from hopeful bands, beseeching him to play their songs.

EMI's McCarroll listens to XM's Unsigned Bands channel and, though he hasn't signed any bands he's heard, several have piqued his interest, he said.

Shawn Christensen, stellastarr's lead singer and songwriter, said the XM exposure combined with play on college radio stations and articles in the alternative music press "generates the buzz, which is ultimately the foundation for a band getting signed."

RCA President Richard Sanders said XM did not play a direct role in stellastarr's signing, but said XM and its rival, New York's Sirius Satellite Radio, are vital to building recognition for new bands and, more important, album sales. XM was launched in 2001 and now has nearly 1.7 million subscribers. Sirius came the next year and has more than 300,000 subscribers.

Sanders and others in the industry have come to realize that XM and Sirius, both of which have teetered near bankruptcy, now combine to reach a national audience of more than 2 million listeners.

Record labels once spent thousands of dollars to get a new song on big radio stations, paying independent promoters who gave much of that money to a radio station's promotion budget in exchange for, they hoped, putting the label's new song in the station's airplay rotation. Critics call the system legalized payola.

"The big radio promotion budgets of yesteryear are gone," said Bill Burrs, RCA's vice president of rock music, the man in charge of getting the label's artists on radio. "Before, you could just load the gun and shoot. But no one's spending $200,000 or $300,000 to blow out a single anymore."

Some such promotion still goes on, but record companies no longer have as much money to throw around, and radio stations are more reluctant to play songs from artists who are not proven hit-makers, because their research shows that listeners mainly want to hear artists they know. Unfamiliar artists cause most listeners to switch stations, and each lost rating point means lost advertising revenue.

Unsigned bands have an even tougher time cracking the big over-the-air radio stations. "Other than localized specialty shows, it's pretty tough if not impossible to get any commercial airplay," Burrs said.