Back in January I declared 2007 the Year of Country Music. The goal? To write country songs and get them recorded and, as a result, make a lot of money. Why? One top 40 country “hit” is worth approximately six years of number one songs on Adult Christian radio and that kind of cash would allow me to give my own music away and play concerts for free easily...quite easily.
I have a couple friends who’ve made it big in the country writing scene and they’ve offered to co-write with me so, here we go.
I sit down to write a song every day. Not an entire song, actually, but some piece of one at least. And lately what’s been coming out quite easily is country pop, which, as it turns out, sounds a lot like 4Him in the early nineties. Go figure. It’s an easy sound to channel lately. So I’m going with it.
Soon I’ll sit in a room with country lyricists and melodists and we’ll work on one or all of these snippets I’ve coughed up recently and, hopefully, one of them will become a big fat hairy hit.
The thing is, some musicians consider this selling out, sacrificing art for wealth. Well, yea. My question? Why is that a moral no no? Why is it wrong, to some, to use talent in a way that draws a large crowd, that sells out: sells out theatres, stadiums, etc? Why, especially when the resulting plunder is used for good, is this morally repulsive to some more “artful” musicians? What if “art” were suddenly more popular than country top 40? Would it be “selling out” to make it then?
While we ponder these and other not-so-important questions, here’s today’s snippet of sell-out goodness, sans lyrics.
The upside to playing shows on behalf of Compassion International at no cost to promoters is that I’m busier than ever. We’re averaging twice as many shows each month than we did wen charging promoters. But there is a downside. ANd it’s become a problem.
Some promoters book me now because free gives them a chance to put on a show for their church or city without risking anything. The thing is that risk is what makes promoters work hard to get butts in the seats, it turns out, and without risk we’re discovering that some first time promoters do a less than stellar job of promoting.
Promoters who’ve been in the concert business for years realize that you can’t over promoter a show. It’s impossible. And they know that even huge acts won’t draw a crowd if posters are all that’s getting the word out. And full-time promoters, who pay thousands of dollars to bring artists, MUST draw a crowd or they don’t eat.
This is the downside of free: Our clientel has become almost entirely first time promoters trying their hand at promoting at no financial risk to themselves and doing, sometimes, a not so good job of getting people there.
We’ve played for less than fifty people on this tour in cities where we usually pack the place out with several hundred. As we’ve tried to figure out why, I decided to post this list of things promoters may want to do to over-promote our upcoming shows and I want to ask any promoters out there reading this to please share their ideas in the comments of this post. Here’s a small list of things that can and probably should be done to promote a show:
1. DON’T spend money on radio ads. They don’t work. It is very expensive and, in our experience over the last seven years, promoters never get a boost in attendance because of them. DO ask the local radio station to interview the artist during drive time. This, for some reason, does seem to help. The best bang from radio is having the station as an official sponsor of the show. When the radio station’s name is on the show, so to speak, they tend to talk non-stop about the show during every time slot of the day. Stations usually won’t sponsor a show unless they benefit financially from it, which won’t be the case if the ticket price is FREE.
2. Mail posters and bulletin inserts to churches but call them first to make sure they will use them. This saves you printing money too. Then call the churches to make sure they received them and ask how and when they will be used. Visit the churches to see if they were in fact used the way they were supposed to be. Doesn’t seem like you’d need to do this but trust me, you do. There are a million things going on in the life of a church, zillions of activities and promotions going on. You have to kindly make sure your concert is getting the wall time and announcement time you were told it would get.
3. Ask Christian owned businesses and restaurants to put up posters and stuff bags with flyers about the show. A fast food place serving a few thousand people a day can get the word out about a concert quickly doing this and by putting a “table talker” on every table.
4. Ask local churches that are helping promote the show to mention the show in their newsletter to members. If the show is ticketed, offer a discount or a free ticket to people who print out a coupon printed in their bulletin or church newsletter.
5. Get Christian organizations on college campuses to spread the word. Offer students a discount or a select area of seating (the first five rows, for instance. Fellowship of CHristian Athletes, Campus Crusade, the Baptist Student Ministries are all organizations that may be willing to tell their students about the show.
6. Call the religion editor for the local paper and ask him/her if they’d like to interview the artist.
7. Talk radio is a powerful tool for promotion that few think about. Many conservative talk show hosts are Christians and are open about that fact. Ask them if they’ll mention the show or interview the artist. Chances are slim since that’s not the point of their show but it’s worth a shot.
8. Ask every blogger you know in your city to blog about the show a month out, then two weeks out, then the week of. You can find bloggers in your city by searching technorati for your city’s name. It’s along process but it can pay off.
9. Ask every person in your college and youth groups to promote the concert to their myspace friends. Most teens have a myspace space now and if each one has a dozen local friends that can add up quickly.
That’s just a few ideas that cost you nothing or very little. What other ideas do you have?
"Becky” is the name the industry has given to the listener targeted by Adult Contemporary Christian radio stations. Here’s what radio stations freely admit about Becky:
She’s a Christian 35-40 year-old mother
She does the buying in her family
She’s in the mini-van a lot
Becky is an easier target than, say, her daughter (Brittany) or her husband (Bob), for advertisers to hit with radio ads
Several years ago when I was on AC radio a great deal my audience was packed every night with Beckys. And I got to know her. We e-mailed back and forth. We stood in book stores and in church lobbies and shot the breeze. She introduced me to her kids. I played free shows at her favorite mall. We spent a lot of time together. There’s more to Becky than those four bullet points suggest. And radio stations know it.
I’ve seen industry research, spent time with radio program directors and consultants and they paint a more complete picture of Becky - they know what I know and they have the numbers to prove it. Becky is not all Christian women 35-40 years old driving a mini-van, listening to commercials and doing most of the shopping in her house. She can be described in even more detail.
One industry study commissioned by a network found that Becky (the woman actually listening to Christian radio) is more likely to be from the most conservative end of the Christian spectrum than the average church goer. It used Barna’s method of dividing all self-professing Christians in America into several groups from most liberal (all ways lead to God, the bible isn’t God’s Word, Jesus may not have actually existed, etc) to most conservative. The study said - and I’m having to post this from memory because now non one will let me see the study again - that lest than 15% of self-professing Christians in America are in t the most conservative category. BUT - and this is when the light bulb came on for me - they are the MAJORITY of Christian radio listeners. Just over 50%.
Now, this was three years ago. Things may have changed. And how scientific the study was I don’t know. But I know my experiences with Becky confirm the assertion that, in general, Becky is far more conservative than the majority of Christians in churches every Sunday. And, here’s the rub, far more conservative than me and the rest of the music folks in Nashville. Not just in their faith, but in all things: parenting, politics, gender roles, etc.
Consider this.
Becky probably doesn’t drink or like those who do. If a morning show host were to even allude to drinking on his show, what would happen? I’ve been on a dozen artists’ tour buses though and ALL OF THEM had alcohol in the fridge. Every industry party I’ve been to - after Dove parties, Christmas parties - have had open bars.
Becky reads Lucado. I love Lamott. She’s stretched by Rick Warren. I’m stretched by Beuchner and Bonhoeffer. I’m not superior, not smarter, not more spiritual, just different. We’re not interested in or thinking in the same way about the same things.
Becky doesn’t cuss and would not consider a cussing person to be godly - someone she should listen to. But she does without knowing it. Let’s just say that artists on AC radio aren’t always safe for the whole family - just when they’re in public.
Becky’s more likely to have strong feelings about the flag, patriotism, our rights as Christians, the evilness of Halloween and “Happy Holidays” and to subscribe to James Dobson’s newsletter. I’m, um, not. At all. I refused once on the air to say the pledge of allegiance. I wasn’t a jerk about it. I just said I’m thankful to live in America and for all that affords me but I just don’t pledge allegiance to the flag. I tried to laugh it off. I offered to pray and thank God for America instead but it didn’t matter. Becky was already ticked. Becky likes to hear patriotic songs and patriotic songs on the radio. She confuses love of nation with love of Jesus. Why else would songs like “There She Stands” and “Letters From War” be played? What do they really have to do with the mission of the station? Everything. They attract Becky. Then Becky buys stuff.
Even the denominations Becky tends toward are different from those of industry folks. There are a lot of Baptist Beckys. And Assemblies of God and non-denominational Becky’s. She’s what some would call “Evangelical.” For the longest time the two churches where most artists living in Nashville went were Presbyterian. That’s changed some in recent years but still, you get the idea when talking to artists about their faith and growing up in church that they don’t worship alongside Becky on Sunday morning.
For longest time I didn’t get this. I didn’t understand that Becky isn’t all females 35-40, she’s all very conservative white evangelical patriotic too-busy-or-lzay-or-tired to think females. So, I went around telling radio guys that I don’t know any 35-40 year old church going females who like Christian music. I told this to Matt Austin, station manager of WAY-FM in Nashville. He was my Sunday school teacher at the time and we were having a party. Our entire class of 25-40 year-olds were there, grilling hot dogs, throwing frisbees, relaxing and listening to the radio. The host had turned it to WAY-FM, she told me, because Matt was there.
I married a woman who fits the simplest description of Becky. She’s thirty-seven. She has three kids (6, 4, 2). She’s white. She drives a mini-van. She’s too busy driving and negotiating peace in the back seat to change the station when commercials come on. She handles our finances and does most of the shopping. She attends church regularly.
But she doesn’t like Christian radio. Nor do any of our many many friends who also fit the this description of Becky. (And no, none of them are musicians or married to any.)
For good reason.
She’s not the Becky radio is after. She loves God. She loves people. But she doesn’t see how Christian radio plays any part in making her better at either task. She doesn’t like that it’s humor is sappy, its agenda is sometimes political and it’s music all sounds the same. If anything, it tempts her to consume more crap she doesn’t need, care about things that aren’t truly important to Jesus, and fill her head with what she thinks says the same things over and over again.
My Becky isn’t interested in Christian radio. And radio doesn’t care. Nor should they. She’s not the real target.
We’ve talked about this before over on Shlog. I don’t think trading music for five e-mail addresses is the same thing as offering music for free. Free, to me, means no strings attached, nothing in exchange.
But that doesn’t make it wrong, or a bad idea. In fact, trading fans something for music is brilliant.
Derek Webb doesn’t like the Christian music industry. The very idea of it. He says so in his latest podcast. Here are some quotes:
“I don’t think a lot of marketing yourself, promoting yourself based on your world view. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’d much rather just be able to make music and not have expectations based on my worldview on it, because no one else has to deal with that. It’s been hard for me to deal with that. It’s kept me from being honest a few times. Because I’m afraid of, or I know that I won’t be able to get away with, really doing or saying or really creating art I have in me to do but I know is not going to work. I know I’m not going to be able to get away with it. And the only reason I can’t get away with it is because I’m in a market that promotes me based on my worldview…I’m first a Christian for some reason. Like I can’t just be an artist and be honest. I have to be a Christian artist. So immediately I’m judged by that first.”
“I think Christianity is disparaged, like the idea, the world view of Christianity, the idea of following Jesus, is seen as not a very good idea based on the bad art that people make under the heading of Christian art. I think people see bad Christian art and it makes them less likely to want to even take a look at the person of Jesus and what it means to follow Him.”
“I think churches are bad concert venues…I don’t playing in churches. I don’t subjecting churches to having to have concerts.”
“If you want to just sing songs just go and do that, no one’s stopping you.”
