Supergroup. Say it out loud “Supergroup”. Does that word leave a bitter taste in your mouth? So many enterprises of exquisite promise, so much shattered hope. Approach all supergroups with scepticism, you say, and rightly so.

So is (Wino+Om+Neurosis+Melvins) > (Wino+Om+Neurosis+Melvins)? That remains to be seen, however it does add up to a stoner/doom/post-rock/prog party to which we should all turn up and revel. Shrinebuilder is a real meeting of minds. The various styles weave in and out of each other and melt, blend and bend to fit a new mould that overall is not quite any of them. It is at times, however, each of them. With Wino, Kelly and Cisneros all taking turns on the mic, you sometimes feel like you’re listening to 3 different bands, often in the same song.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t hang together. Some how they’ve made it sound like these 3 wildly different styles belong together. Underpinned by Cisneros’s hypnotic bass, and sheened with Neurosis style atmospherics and post-hardcore aggression, Wino’s trademark psychedelic guitars drive us through this eerie landscape. However, it’s the southern tinged post-rock soundscapes that really define the sound here so it transcends the component parts.

Almost a genre it itself, this is a singular debut and delivers the sort of quality and creativity that you’d expect from such an influential posse. It’s still too much of a sketch to really be the collective masterwork that these guys should be capable of, but if there’s a sense that Shrinebuilder are still finding their feet with this first offering, I absolutely can’t wait to see what happens when they do.

Buy on Amazon

Listen on Myspace

What I spent my hard earned cash on recently.

Completely failing to do the honourable thing, Alice in Chains released the controversial comeback-after-loosing-a-key-member album and managed not to offend everyone, in fact, anyone. Black Gives Way to Blue is nothing short of stunning. Dark, brooding, sludgy but with lashings of gorgeous melody and soaring vocal harmonies that evoke the spirit of Layne Stayley without kicking his corpse. William Duval does an impressive job of stepping into giant, baggage laden shoes and even manages to shine in places. However, Cantrell with his devastating riffs and sound defining harmonies is the star here…and perhaps he always was?

Megadeth never went away. Some (including me) wish they had. Mustain may have reinvented my Megadeth’s sound many a time, but he’s never managed to come close to capturing the magic of the first 5 albums (and most specifically Rust in Peace). Endgame is no exception. It maybe a tour de force of modern thrash, but it’s not hard to stand out from that particular crowd, and Endgame fails to really excite or challenge. Comparisons with Death Magnetic are beside the point (I happen to think that Metallica’s is the better album, as untrendy as that my be to admit), Megadeth are hiding their lack of creativity behind an (admittedly dazzling) array of technical expertise. Entertaining but not essential.

Ever wanted to un-hear an album so that you could fall in love with it all over again? This is what I felt about Baroness’s Red Album. Since no technology has been invented to enable this (other than perhaps a carefully applied cricket bat to the head) my only hope was that their follow-up The Blue Record would have the same affect on me. Sadly, I was disappointed. Despite the fact that Baroness are still at the top of their game, The Blue Album just doesn’t pack the same punch as its predecessor. All the ingredients are still there, but the exhilarating instrumental flourishes that really define their sound manifest as more traditional prog meandering. Although I’m still in this for the long haul the romance just isn’t there anymore.

I picked up on Every Time I Die with their last record The Big Dirty. I was charmed by their lyrical satire and swaggering grooves. Expeditions into their previous works failed to excite me in the same way. So I wasn’t particularly pleased on discovering that their new album New Junk Aesthetic was a return to the older, more hardcore sound. They obviously lost their bottle. Unadventurous and uninteresting.

Om’s groovy repetition and monotonous chanting generally either sends you to sleep or into a nirvana like transcendental plain. I generally just find it soothing. God is Good is no great departure in terms of overall intent, however the sound has taken on a cinematic feel perhaps making it more accessible to the masses. This is nice, but it actually detracts from the minimalist, hypnotic groove that really defines their sound. That said, I quite like the eastern flavourings in their own right, but I think it will leave most Om fans feeling like they only got half an album.

I’m not sure what to say about the new Pelican album What We All Come to Need. More of the same as the last album. Unchallenging but pleasant enough.

Grind Madness at the BBC documents the legendary Peel Sessions with Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror, Bolt Thrower et al. It’s a tonne of fun and has some great packaging. As a historical document it is nigh-on genre defining. Utterly recommended for all fans of extreme music.

I was in the unenviable situation this past week of not having a copy of the new Baroness album. This sort of situation is not usually a big issue, but this particular time it left me in an existential quandary that lead me to yet more pondering on the nature of music retail.

You see, I want the physical copy. Specifically I want the CD. This CD would immediately be ripped directly to MP3 and unceremoniously injected onto my iPod. But having a physical copy is still important to me. I place a certain value in this, not least with a band like Baroness who have such delightful artwork.

So having not had the forethought to pre-order and finding the HMV cupboard predictably bare I was left either having to wait a couple of days for a copy from Amazon, listening to it on Myspace, downloading from iTunes or ‘borrowing’ a copy from one of those lovely fire-sharing sites. Now, I don’t want to pay twice, and I simply cannot wait. Myspace isn’t an option as I need it on my iPod so I can listen on the go. Spotify is potentially an option, but I’ll have to use my iPhone for that, and the battery only last 73 seconds, and I need that for the making/taking calls. So I’m left with the prospect of having to ‘borrow’ it for a few days while ordering off the web. What sort of a situation is this to find myself in in the digital age?

What would be really handy is if someone would sell the CD online and then give me the MP3’s to be getting on with while I wait. I don’t want to be charged extra for this, I’ve already paid for the music. However, decoupling the music from the physical product has some interesting theoretical consequences. Let’s deconstruct this situation a little.

Basically, what I want is the music. To accompany that music I would like a physical item. In this case it’s a CD, but it could be a record, tape, USB stick, a tuneful midget with the music memorised, whatever. In the modern age, there’s no real need to have anything actually contain the music for an individual. The vast majority of people don’t need CD’s any more than they need the bottle containing the beer, it just so happens to be one medium for transporting the stuff inside.

So the situation that we’re in is that people choose to ‘attach’ a CD to their music purchase. Or put another way, they buy a CD which comes (conveniently) with some music on it. But why are obsolete (in the practical sense) music containing objects the only choice of ‘thing’ that comes as an accompaniment to the music? Why not t-shirts, posters, books, shoes, branded luxury leather recliner etc.? The record companies have a vested interest in getting you to buy stuff from them, and especially walking-billboard/culture items like t-shirts. This way they incentivise people to buy from them (rather than ‘stealing’ the music) as well as getting that person in a purchase cycle with them – which is potentially the most valuable aspect here.

So why not offer MP3 + CD packages? (and thus solving my immediate need) But also offer MP3 + t-shirt packages, or with records or hats or hat stands or gig tickets or books or comics or all of the above in a single transaction. Why not sell t-shirts in shops with a memory stick with the music. Hell, give the actual CD away with the t-shirt, but without the cover or any fancy packaging.

People could just go to iTunes and buy the album, but why not just buy a t-shirt and get the album for ‘free’? Of course you could make more money by selling both, but don’t kid yourself on how many folks would bother buying a t-shirt once they’ve bought the music, and if you ask me, a t-shirt sale is more valuable than a music sale.

In the end I ‘borrowed’ the music and the bought the album on vinyl, which costs more than the CD that I would have otherwise bought. I’m struggling to see where Baroness lost out here….

I found myself recently lecturing a non-metal fan, who harboured a preconception that metal is a narrow and one-dimensional genre, on what a diverse bunch we metalheads are. And boy does this show on this, the first ever Inevitable Nose Metal Mixtape. We have Classic Metal, d-beat punk, brutal thrash, doom, grunge, industrial, and even Nu-Metal.

Despite the overall washed out homogeneity of mainstream metal, the underground once again proves itself diverse and challenging. There’s something for most tastes here and perhaps a little something to broaden your horizons.

All tracks can be streamed in their entirety and most can be downloaded via the Soundcloud media player. Please post comments on what you thought of the tracks as I’m sure all the bands would value your (constrictive) criticism. Also, the Soundcloud player has a commenting function that allows you to comment on particular parts of the song that you liked (or hated).

Anyway, enough of this pointless chatter. Go forth and consume of the mixtape and feel your life infinitely enrichened.

The Inevitable Nose Metal Mixtape Volume 1

Apparently there are trace elements of metal in bottled water...

Still the filesharing battles wages on, despite the fact that there is no war. Dom Lawson’s entertaining article on this subject apparently fell foul of Metal Hammer’s editorial scythe. We can only assume that they didn’t want to fall on the wrong side of this prickly debate. And who can blame them, why risk pissing off your superiors over a war that’s apparently being waged elsewhere?

I do wonder though, how many folks out there who are earnestly ‘trying’ before conveniently ‘forgetting’ to buy. Is this costing the music industry money? Maybe. However, that’s largely beside the point. The issue here is that music is no longer a commodity that can be contained and rationed. The commodities are the physical items that accompany the music – the CD, the cover, the box – these are tangible goods that should be exchanged for money.

It’s because music is freely available that this situation exists. I’m sorry to restate the obvious, but it’s worth thinking about this. Water is ‘freely’ available in the UK. We pay for that by way of taxes (rates). The only time you pay at the point of receipt of water is when you buy the bottled stuff, and then what you’re actually paying for is the container and the convenience (plus the mark-up of whatever establishment you purchase it from). The future model of music will resemble this, and take a look at Spotify to see this in action. The music industry already knows this and the majors all own a stake in Spotify. The problem with this is the margins are much lower with models like this, and until the majors can shuffle their operating models to account for this and pacify the investors, they’re going to carry on chasing rainbows with lawyers and politicians.

By the way, the words on this page are not a commodity either. By the time this piece makes it onto the blog it will have eaten at least an hour and a half of my time. This blog probably eats more of my time per month than your average unsigned band does of the band members’ time. Should you wish to take these and consume them in any way you see fit then please feel free to do so. If you want me to save them onto a CD and send them across to you I’ll charge you for the CDR, postage, packaging, and round that up for my efforts. If more people start to read this blog, maybe I’ll put some advertising on it and try and cover the cost of the server and maybe I’ll even get a bit extra. If you want to take any of my articles and make money out of them (god knows how you would do this) by posting them on your own, commercial, website, then you will have to pay me. If you do not I may take legal action. Will I try and charge you for simply reading this article/blog despite that is takes time, effort and money to run? Hell no! Readers are more important to me than profit, and without them I stand no chance of making any anyway. The printed media industries learned this years ago. These days, some newspapers are moving to models that they no longer charge even for the physical product, and make money from the extra advertising revenue gleaned from the larger distribution.

I don’t know why I’m telling this to you lot – you already know this. I also don’t know why I bitch about the fact that this debate is still happening, I actually quite enjoy it.

No Abbath, not that sort of campaign

So your adoring fan base has swarmed to your website and signed up to your mailing list. You also got a bunch of email addresses at your last gig. Before you start firing off tantalizing epistles documenting your drunken studio antics and news of your drummer’s breakup with his girlfriend (gotta keep the groupies happy, right?) let me urge you to exercise a little restraint, and think about how you intend to use your entrusting fans’ details.

When you hear big companies talking about ‘marketing campaigns’ they’re not merely referring to the latest stupid advert aimed at coercing you to buy their shit washing powder. A campaign is usually a targeted schedule of communication and grouping of themed marketing that is being enacted for a specific reason. Marketing campaigns are rarely begun with the sole directive of ‘selling more stuff’ although that is usually the ultimate goal. More likely, a high up exec noticed that they were selling well to the under 30’s, so they designed a campaign specifically aimed at selling to that demographic. Other reasons may be a new product launch, basic product awareness (perhaps of the back of poor sales versus a competitor), acquiring new customers, or selling more to existing customers. All these goals require very different campaigns and modes of communication.

You should think of your communications to your fans in a similar context. So before sending out a single email, ask yourself, ‘what is it that I’m trying to achieve?’ Perhaps you’re just about to go on tour, and you want to get people to gigs. Maybe you’re just about to release a new EP or album. You may just be interested in striking a rapport with your fans. Maybe what you want is a bigger email list. Perhaps you want to all of the above.

The next question to ask yourself is “what does success look like?” There’s little point in a campaign that achieves nothing, and understanding the specific goals you want to achieve is vital when constructing your campaign. Some possible outcomes are:

• Gig ticket sales, or higher attendance
• Hits to your Myspace or website
• Downloads of your new track(s)
• Signups to your mailing list
• Album sales CD or iTunes
• Merchandise sales
• Beers bought for you by fans post-gig
• Mentions on other sites (blogs, review sites, news sites etc.)
• Ego boost, attention from ladies/guys/both etc.

It’s likely that several of the above are important to you. So state your objectives, and write them down somewhere, you’ll need to refer back to this when making decision about how to conduct your campaign – if something you’re doing doesn’t contribute to these goals, should you really be doing it?

The next dimension to consider is time. There are key dates in your band’s diary that are important in this endeavour: album release date, tour dates, band t-shirts get delivered, interview/review appears in some magazine. Communications to your fans should mean something to the fans and should be delivered at the right time to be relevant to the corresponding event. If the only email you send advertising your new album release is sent 6 weeks before it’s available, then that message will be lost or forgotten. Conversely, you need to give people plenty of advance warning for gigs, but you don’t want to tell them until the tickets are actually available.

So perhaps you’ve got a new album coming out, a short tour to support this, and t-shirts with the album cover on the front being sold online and at the gigs. This calls for a well structured email campaign, as there’s quite a lot going on. Before you set down a single word of an email, write down a schedule for those events and corresponding communications to the fan base. Your campaign summary may look something like this (except with realistic dates!):

Oct 1st – Recording/mixing finishes
Oct 7th – Initial teaser email send to tell the fanbase about the album
Oct 10th – t-shirts available
Oct 14th – Pressing finishes, hard copies delivered
Oct 15th – 2nd email drop with album releases date and artwork, track listing and links to buy t-shirts and pre-order album
Oct 20th – Tour dates confirmed, tickets available
Oct 22nd – 3rd email drop, tour dates, ticket sources, album, release date, t-shirt link
Nov 1st – Album released
Nov 1st – 4th email drop with links to buy album, t-shirts, tour dates etc.
Nov 15th – 5th Email drop to remind folks who didn’t buy your. Remind about the tour
Nov 17th – tour begins
…

This is the campaign you will execute to. Don’t send ANY other emails. Be wary of communicating release dates early on, or until they’re absolutely committed to, otherwise you’ll have to send out an embarrassing retraction. Early teaser emails should say something like “touring before the end of the year” or “in the shops this spring”.

The emails’ design, colour scheme and construction should be consistent throughout the campaign. Also, make sure it’s obvious what to click on or where to go to get the stuff you’re advertising (these are called ‘calls to action’ in business speak).

If you’re feeling really ambitious, you could accompany this with a purely online campaign, using your website, Twitter, Myspace or whatever, to try and coerce new punters to your Fanbridge/Reverb Nation site and thus widen your audience for the big release.

Campaigns can get infinitely more complicated than this, however it’s always important not to overstate your message or saturate your audience. Always revisit your objectives and why you are communicating with your fans, and ask yourself before sending any emails “do they really care?”

That’s quite a lot to take in. I’ll leave you to digest for a while!

CRM for Bands – Turning fans into Fanatics

CRM for Metal Bands #1: Make contact

1 band, 5 questions, 1 minute per question...

Profile

Name: Mr. Necro D. Mortimer

Band: Necro Deathmort

From: London, UK

What you do in Necro Deathmort: Take up 50% of it

Label: Distraction

Website: http://www.myspace.com/necrodeathmort

The Questions

Describe Necro Deathmort in exactly 3 words

Necro. Death. Mort.

Name 3 albums you could not live without

1. Skrewdriver/Fishbone “Split ep”
2. Bobcat Goldthwaite “Halelluja”
3. Chuck Norris “Live At The Apollo”

Tell me something I don’t know about Necro Deathmort

We have our own energy drink coming out next year – it’s called Brownade.

What is Necro Deathmort doing at the moment?

Trying to think of amusing answers for an interview and failing miserably.

You have 5 minutes alone with Simon Cowell, how will you use them?

We will break into our synchronised dance routine – Simmo will get an instant chubby at the sight of us in hotpants, and get us signed to Candlelight quick smart.

This is the second release from German label Ván this year that’s got me really excited. Whereas The Devil’s Blood take a playful approach to pagan rites, Griftegard cast an epic pall of quasi-religious, existential gloom – this is not a criticism, this is remarkable stuff.

Sacred.Solemn.Severe is the musical equivalent of a Doré etching, or perhaps a rainy day in Highgate Cemetery. Chants, hymns and histrionic, impassioned crooning tell of hatred of the flesh and solemn introspection. The overwhelming protestant puritanical aesthetic is both claustrophobic and apocalyptic – Griftegard wield Christian symbolism like a sledgehammer.

Unlike many doom acts who lurk on the periphery of parody with Hammer Horror theatrics, Griftegard emanate a sense of solemn, ernest duty – this is serious stuff, and at times is somewhat unsettling. This is underpinned by some exemplary song writing and haunting soulful melody. These 6 long songs end at with the ultimate finale – death, but there are undertones of rebirth or perhaps redemption, and you get the feeling that Griftegard have a lot more to say.

Griftegard display a depth, clarity and coherence that other Doom bands could only aspire to. A steamy breath of cold, dank winter air – both refreshing and unnerving.

Listen on Myspace

Buy from Amazon

Even more technomologically advanced than this!

While I seem to have found myself in the position of giving advice to aspiring bands on how best to use and abuse these new-fangled interwebs, I’ve yet to be particularly active in these pursuits myself. So in an attempt to ‘put my money where my mouth is’, so to speak, I’ve devised The Inevitable Nose Metal Mixtape. There’s nothing particularly new about the concept – a compilation of music from new bands – and the only ‘cutting edge’ thing involved is the use of Soundcloud (more on this in a later article). I merely intend to practise what I preach, and attempt to draw some attention to unsigned metal bands that are worthy of it.

So, demand permitting, I’m going to put together a regular mixtape of (mostly) downloadable tracks, which will also stream from this site, with ‘cover notes’ including a review of the band by your’s truly and links off to the bands’ sites/Myspaces. I’ll then employ all my best CRM, SEO and PPC strategies (and whatever other corporate marketing acronyms I can find) to drive some traffic to the mixtape.

Bands wishing to appear on the mixtape just need to commit to the inclusion of a single track, read the T&C’s and follow instructions here. The selection of tracks for the mixtape assumes a level of quality (both technically and artistically) so not everyone band submitted will make it on. There will be a broad range of styles and sub-genres but it will all be at the heavier end of the rock/metal/*core scale. Reviews will represent any tracks up on Myspace as well as the track submitted.

The first mixtape will be delivered as soon as I have 10 or so tracks of sufficient quality to release. Subscribers to my newsletter will receive notification when it’s available.

Sign up to our mailing list

However, for this to work, I need bands to submit themselves, so please pass this on to any bands that you think may be interested.

AIC+CRM=WIN

There was an excellent example of CRM building up to the release of Alice in Chains’ new album Black Gives Way to Blue. Here’s what they did:

1. Introduced some teaser videos onto the internet for the their new track thus creating buzz
2. Several days later they made the full video available
   At roughly the same time they made the track available free online for fans once they submitted their email address
3. Several weeks later these fans were sent correspondence regarding the release date of their new album, plus info about merch available
4. Soon after they advertised that the album would by available for pre-sales, and that anyone who purchased the album on pre-sale would receive another track off of the album immediately for free
5. When the album was release they sent more email with details of where to get the album and more merchandising links

The buzz around Black Gives Way to Blue was immense. Before the album was released they had sold a bunch of albums and load of merch, and fans suspicious of a band returning without their revered frontman are now singing along with the new singer and material at gigs.

Make no mistake, this is exemplary music marketing – marketing of ANY kind. AIC had a hard job ahead of them, after being away for over a decade, to convince a bunch of fans already suspicious of the whole venture that they were still relevant. Well they certainly took the risk out of the situation!

This approach was clearly tailored for the needs of a massive band, but the same principles apply to any band. The 3 basic steps are:

1. Announce your presence
2. Locate your fans
3. Talk to them

Step 1 and 3 I’ll cover off in a later article. Here I’ll concentrate on step 2 as you need to give it a little forethought before you plough into this endeavour.

So when people turn up at your gig, or website or Myspace, you need to be ready to try and grab some information about them.

Now, I’m going to talk explicitly about email in this article. In theory, any detail you can get about your fans is useful (for example Twitter/Facebook/Myspace account, address, phone number, favourite bands, shoe size, propensity to put out) but email is still the most versatile, powerful and easy to exploit, plus pretty much everyone has an email address.

Ideally you want email address and name (first, and preferably full), but just email address is fine. There are various ways to grab this info.

• At gigs. Put a sheet of paper on the merch counter to get folks to sign up for your mailing list. Consider offering an incentive for this, perhaps a free button badge, or a discount voucher for the next gig.
• Folks you run into. You’re always banging on about your band to whoever will listen, at parties and stuff, right? Folks sound interested? GET THEIR EMAIL! Wake up next to that random chick who’s wearing nothing but your AC/DC socks? Decided you never want to see her again? I don’t care, GET HER EMAIL!
• Collect it online. I saw a particularly good example of an unsigned band doing this recently. The most excellent prog-metalers Stone Circle announced via Twitter that they are giving away a free MP3 from their current EP, and more free stuff to come, to anyone who will sign up to their mailing list using a service called FanBridge. This site exists for the explicit purpose of collecting an managing email lists for bands. They offer a bunch of tool to manage your email campaigns and I’ll be referencing them a LOT in upcoming articles. Do go and sign-up to Stone Circle’s FanBridge list by the way – they will get signed soon and will probably stop giving away their excellent music.

So you’ve got a bunch of email addresses, what do you do with them? This I will cover in more detail in later articles, but for the moment, you need to store them somewhere. The first thing to do is transfer details collected in the real world to you computer, preferably into MS Excel (if you or your folks don’t have a copy, try Google Docs which has a free online spreadsheet) and save somewhere safe. FanBridge will let you upload lists of fan detail from Excel, so if you have an account this is a good idea.

For details collected at gigs, note the town that the gig was in as part of the details you collect. Later, when you’re telling folks about your tour, you won’t need to spam people in Brighton about your gig in Glasgow; you can create a separate email for each town or area.

Now, before you get too excited and start spamming your list with random photos of the band getting drunk, beware the evils of excessive email. If people don’t like what you send them, they’ll simply mark your email address as spam, and all further mails from your email address will be relegated to the junk mail folder. Before you send out any email at all, you need to plan your email campaign based on what you need to get out of it. This we will discuss in the next article. In the meantime, get collecting kiddies!

CRM for Bands – Turning fans into Fanatics