The folks over at 37 Signal’s Signal vs. Noise just posted a great analysis on lessons that can be learned from Danny Meyer’s success with his Shake Shack burger spots in NYC. They’re nicely in line with the theories from 37 Signal’s great “Getting Real” book. Read the original article here, and my translation for the music business below.
Applying Danny Meyer’s Lessons To The Music Industry:
1. Have an enemy. (In Meyer’s case, the enemy is fast food that strips away the human experience.)
At Family Records, if we would have to consider anyone our enemy, even if just for motivational purposes, it would of course be the old-school major label model. Similar to the fast food restaurants they have treated customers as cattle, and their product (actual cattle ha!) as cookie-cutter products without edge or a focus on quality. It’s easy to see how smaller indie labels, when run well, can spend a lot more time and attention on both satisfying their customers and supporting their artists in a more personal way. Delivering a superior user experience creates a lot of good will and will lead to higher customer loyalty and support. Putting that human touch back into the music experience is something that is one of the key competitive advantages indies should focus on. Don’t deliver music that’s a metaphorical hormone-drenched piece of factory steak, but provide the grass-fed, antibiotic-free locally grown equivalent for the customers and they will appreciate it.
2. Resist growth just for the sake of growth.
An overall trend in the business world in the 90′s and 00′s was to put growth before anything. More and more we see companies taking their time to grow, focusing first on fully developing the infrastructure, company culture and creating a healthy cash flow. If the start capital is there, it’s of course tempting to start off fast, hire an assistant or two, get 3 partners, get a Manhattan office, sign 15 bands, etc. but is it really that smart? Why not take the route of say a Secretly Canadian, the quiet Bloomington-based indie empire, or Merge, and take your time growing into what you want to become. Patience, again, is underrated in our business.
3. Get real with it, put something out there, and see how people respond.
Major Label Business Model (cliche version): Find a genuine talent, A&R them to death for 3 years with writing sessions and the big producers of the moment, make the special spark disappear and replace it with standard record an album, set it up in the market for 4 months, release the album, if the first week sales disappoint stop spending money on it, refuse to return phone calls from artist.
Suggested Indie Business Model (or Throwback To The 50′s): Find a genuine talent, capture what makes them special and amplify this, put our a 7″ or a digital EP, market it to the appropriate niche, watch the reaction, if it goes well (or not so well but you still believe), release another EP soon after and start building an audience.
4. Keep things simple.
My most-used phrase when talking about the music industry is probably: “It’s not rocket science.” Not to say that this is a simple business, because it certainly isn’t, but often time people unnecessarily complicate things far beyond what they need to do.
You wrote three songs that you think are alright, you’ve played them for your friends and they liked them?
Make Things Complicated: Hire a designer to create your logo, trademark your name right away, look for a manager, start an LLC, order a 1,000 cd run of your ep, look into ads in the local paper.
Keep Things Simple: Write some more and start playing out in front of strangers, burn some cdrs to hand out of your demos or decent live recordings, start an email list, set up a standard myspace or bandcamp page with a free download option. Worry about the rest later.
5. Focus on quality not quantity.
This one I could argue either way for music. Often times I’d rather see an artist release a constant stream of content, rather than just one great song or EP for the year, but the constant content would still have to be of good quality. Not all of it has to be the big radio hit though. People understand that if you make a demo available for download every other week, they are not to expect incredible production. As always, a good balance is the key here. In the end I think that for the long-term, it’s better to put out one classic amazing song, than a 10-album song with 8 mediocre tracks.
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