School of the Arts: Music Remastered

It’s never been easier to become a musician and record and distribute songs, but it’s never been more challenging to make a living as a musician because of all the competition. Fortunately, the School of the Arts is helping students orchestrate this new business model to stardom with its arts management program.

Tyler Boone ’14 is sitting on a couch in the control room at ocean industries studios in an industrial park on James Island.

Before he goes to work in the spacious main studio to finish up his newest EP, “Jealousy,” which he’s funding through a PledgeMusic.com campaign, the clean-cut Americana-blues rocker has to take care of a little of the business part of show business. He opens up his laptop and logs onto his Spotify for Artists account to see how his career is going.

“Oh, look at this,” he says, pointing at the screen. “My single, ‘Paper Wings,’ just got added to a playlist today.”

A click of the track pad and Boone, who averages around 65,000 streams a month, is looking at his listener data, which fluctuates between 4,000 and 10,000 monthly followers.

“It’s like stocks,” he says. “It goes up and down every day. I try not to freak out. It usually just means you got added to a playlist or you got taken off one, so you’ve got to keep hustling to get added to playlists. It’s all about Spotify.”

Spotify and DIY. Budding music stars can no longer wait for a record-label executive to discover them from a demo tape or coffee-shop performance and then turn them into a chart-topping success through the traditional ways of radio and Rolling Stone. They’ve got to go out and grab the bull by the horn section – from crowdfunding albums and tours to constant content creation and self-promotion.

“I’m 41 years old, and it’s still easy to daydream that someone is going to come along and take away all the work that I have to do and make me more successful than I’ve ever imagined,” says Clay Ross ’98, the founder of Ranky Tanky, a Gullah-influenced, jazz and R&B quintet that’s become a critical and commercial success. “But am I going to risk my family’s well-being? No, I’m going make my dream happen.”

He’s not alone. More people than ever it seems are trying to make it as musicians these days. Technology has disrupted a lot of business models in the last couple of decades, but the first monolith to fall in the digital age was the record industry. In this new DIY world, Boone, Ross and other graduates of the College, like Cary Ann Hearst ’01 of Shovels & Rope, have a lot more responsibility than just writing and recording catchy tunes. They’ve also got to do a lot of their own analysis, promotion, producing, managing and booking.

“Constant content is the biggest thing with everyone’s short attention span,” says John Shields ’12, half of the hip-hop duo Little Stranger, which has about 21,000 followers on Spotify. “You’ve got to poke them every day with something – a new photo, a new video, a new song. There’s no more mystery. Back in the day, Led Zeppelin would put out a record, it would be a smash hit and you wouldn’t hear much about them for another seven months. But you just can’t be that way now. You have to be this completely transparent, personable, in-your-face thing every day for people to click on you on their phone.”

School that Rocks

Fortunately for Boone, Shields and others like them, they have an edge on the competition, having majored in the music concentration in the arts management program in the College’s School of the Arts. In one of the fastest-growing majors at the College, students learn how to navigate this new music economy. Instructors like Mark Bryan, lead guitarist of Hootie and the Blowfish, and Heather McDonald, a former record industry executive, show them how to make it in this increasingly entrepreneurial realm. The College even has its own student-run record label, 1770, that has put out a couple dozen singles by local artists and even released a vinyl album this past semester.

“Having Heather and the other arts management professors as a resource in college was hugely beneficial,” says Shields, who is from Philadelphia. “I had no knowledge of how the industry worked or managing yourself as a business. I had the artist brain, not the business brain. Getting linked up with Heather was like having a pseudo manager we could go to with all of our questions. I still reach out to her with questions regularly.”

Bryan, who co-founded Hootie after hearing Darius Rucker’s soulful baritone emanating from a shower stall in their residence hall at the University of South Carolina, can’t believe the difference in the industry between now and when he first started out in the early ’90s.

“It’s the Wild West in the music industry right now,” he says. “There’s no middle ground, and you have to caution kids about that and teach them how that happened. Everything we’re teaching is involved with streaming now and the advent of that.”

In today’s streaming world, the old rules no longer apply. It’s a much more democratic process than before. We, the audience, have much more say in artists’ success because algorithms monitor every time we stream a song, share it or add it to a playlist.

Critical mass will prompt other algorithms and official curators at Spotify and other streaming services, such as Pandora, Apple and Amazon, to further promote it – the holy grail of playlisting.

“There were far fewer paths to success in previous generations for musicians,” says Ross, who was a classical music major. “There were far more gatekeepers, much more exclusivity. The information age has dissolved all of that.”

That’s not to say old-school charm and manners don’t still have a place; they do. Boone, for instance, will often drop $100 catering a radio station’s weekly listening lunch and sends swag like T-shirts or bottles of his new line of Boone’s Bourbon to Spotify curators.

“It’s all about personal relationships, but it’s got to be a good song at the end of the day,” he says, adding that he rarely takes a day off. “I work for myself, but I work all the time. The more you put into it, the bigger it gets.”

That’s one of the key takeaways of the music concentration in the arts management program, which began in 2008 under former chair Scott Shanklin-Peterson after students began expressing an interest in learning about the music industry. Up till then, the program focused primarily on the nonprofit arts, so Shanklin-Peterson reached out to Bryan, a Charleston resident whom she hoped might support the program financially after selling more than 25 million albums with Hootie. He confessed an even better proposition: a desire to teach.

“That gift of his time and amazing connections, enthusiasm and dedication was far more valuable than any financial contribution,” says Shanklin-Peterson, now a senior fellow with the program. “The music industry concentration would never have moved beyond a couple of courses if it had not been for Mark. His desire to teach was extremely fortunate for the arts management program.”

And as a bona fide rock star, he brings great visibility to the program. “He’s an amazing member of our faculty because he’s played all over the world,” says Karen Chandler, the current program director and expert on Charleston’s African American contributions to jazz. “Mark is a true artist-in-residence, teacher and promoter, and uses his network to find our students internships. He’s very involved.”

Right now, the tall, curly-headed Bryan is sitting at a high-top table in the corner of Kudu coffeehouse, drinking a chai tea latte and wearing a Martin Guitars T-shirt. Electric Light Orchestra’s “Telephone Line” is playing on the sound system, ironically, given that land lines have disappeared like CDs and so many other things in the music business.

“This is the best use of my skill set if I’m not going to be on tour,” he says, noting that only about a quarter of the 40 students in the concentration each year are musicians. “A lot of them come into the class knowing they want to work in the industry, but they don’t know what they want to do. Music excites them, and they want to do a job that they’re passionate about. We hope by the end of the semester they find that passion.”

The syllabus tackles the major topics of the industry week by week. The first week, for instance, is devoted to the creative process and songwriting. “We start with the song,” says Bryan, who cowrote many of Hootie’s biggest hits, including “Only Want to Be With You,” “Hold My Hand” and “Let Her Cry.” “There wouldn’t be any of this other stuff without the song.”

Other topics include recording and engineering, live performances, booking gigs and building a team. Six times a year, Bryan brings in industry professionals to talk about their careers for the program’s “In the Mix” series that he moderates. One of the guests this past semester was a former student, Brandon Brooks ’15, who came up with the idea for a booking app while at the College because of his frustration trying to land gigs. Initially developed through the College’s iCat program (now ImpactX), a cross-disciplinary, technology-entrepreneurship competition, the app, called Jyve, simplifies the booking process between musicians and venues while simultaneously giving fans information on musicians’ live performances and body of work. Venues pay a small fee when they book an act, which now stands at more than 1,200 since the app launched last year.

“Every time a gig is booked, it’s then promoted on our live music feed in the app,” says Brooks, who plays drums in a band called Terraphonics. “For the fans, the value proposition is they don’t have to search through everybody’s Facebook page to see who’s playing tonight. For the artists, there needs to be a technology that’s on their side to increase their revenue and volume of gigs. It’s about helping the artist make money and saving time on the booking side of things.”

Money Streams

Brooks may really be onto something given that most musicians, even the most successful ones, make a majority of their income through live gigs since the royalty rate on streaming is paltry, particularly on Spotify, the most popular service with 170 million active users. According to Bryan, who writes, records and releases his own music these days, it takes 1,500 streams for an independent artist to earn what he or she makes off of one 99-cent sale on iTunes, which typically amounts to about 70 cents. (The good news is that the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board just approved a 43.8-percent increase over the next five years.)

Ranky Tanky’s income from streaming and record sales is less than 10 percent of their overall income, despite the fact that their eponymous first album hit No. 1 on the Billboard Jazz chart in January. This year the band, which includes adjunct music professor Quentin Baxter ’98 and Kevin Hamilton ’95, will play 60 shows, including a Spoleto Festival show in the Cistern Yard.

“I love streaming music. It saves me space,” says Ross, who lives in a 700-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn. “I don’t have room for a bunch of CDs. I don’t want them. But it’s a double-edged sword. Something needs to be done about the artists’ compensation. Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ song was streamed however many hundred million times and he made $30,000. How big does a song need to be?”

The biggest payment Shields has seen from Spotify is $75 despite racking up more than 600,000 streams. “Every few months, we get a check that essentially goes into the gas tank,” he says. “We’re better off with people purchasing our music through the website Bandcamp, which is great for artists. They don’t take nearly the amount that other sites are taking. We’ll do ‘pay what you wish’ and we’re seeing most of that money directly.”

Shields might not like the royalty rate on Spotify, but he does appreciate the data analytics. “It’s very interesting to look at,” he says. “You immediately learn all kinds of demographics like age, gender percentage and location. We’re an East Coast–based band, so we have lots of listeners in Charleston, Philly and New York, but our No. 1 is San Jose. I don’t know how that started.”

Although Shields has no plans to do a show in San Jose because of the expense getting there, he will definitely be using the data to plan a tour of cities on the East Coast with heavy streaming, as will Boone. “My top five cities are Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, L.A. and New York,” says Boone, a little surprised that his hometown of Charleston is around 40th. “A lot of bands will book a tour around where they’re blowing up. I know a band that booked a tour in Europe because they were blowing up in Norway.”

Planning shows is a highlight in Heather McDonald’s Music in the Marketplace class, one of four she teaches. This fall will mark the fifth “Boat Show” aboard the Carolina Queen, a three-story paddleboat that sails around the Charleston Harbor with three or four bands on board, typically artists the students are working with. They’ve sold out the 300 tickets every year.

“It gets the students more engaged in 1770 [the College’s student record label] because they want to go to or put on live shows all the time,” says McDonald, who’s been teaching at the College for seven years. “That’s what gets them excited. When they’re writing and sending out press releases and nobody’s returning their calls, they’re like, ‘This is not as fun as I thought it would be!’ But that gives them a more realistic expectation of the music business. It’s not all fun and games.”

1770 helped rising pop band SondorBlue land its first gig in 2016. The group includes three former CofC students, Andrew Halley ’17, Connor Hollifield and John Sheehan (the latter two are on leaves of absences from the College). They founded a limited liability company and have been navigating the music industry for more than a year now, building up a loyal following by honing their craft, both musically and promotionally, and a lot of live performing. Underpinning it all is their liberal arts education and classes in business, poetry, songwriting and acting, among others.

SondorBlue, which is known for its harmonies, has since released two EPs and has more than 31,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. One of their role models sonically, as well as commercially, is 20-year-old British pop star Rex Orange County, a.k.a. Alex O’Connor, who has 2.7 million followers on Spotify. His infectious but simplistic hit, “Loving Is Easy,” which has more than 25 million streams, has a lo-fi quality sound that’s very appealing.

As a home to great live music, Charleston has a number of state-of-the-art recording studios such as Ocean Industries, but another, Spinning Whale, is run by Endre Tomaschek ’08 right out of his ranch-style house in West Ashley.“It all started with us seeing artists like Rex who were successful doing it on their own,” says Halley, the lead vocalist who majored in creative writing and grew up in Hilton Head, S.C., like his bandmates. “It’s called Bedroom Pop. I’m pretty sure he recorded his LP in a studio, but what we all notice is that his singles, which sound much different, are a little more authentic and they’re at the top of his Spotify. I think that says something about the movement. People want authenticity.”

“With the technology that’s available today, musicians can make a record out of their closet,” he says, noting that he records a lot of bands live. “I use the whole house to make a recording, with the instruments in the living room and bedrooms and the amps isolated in other rooms so the songs will have a live energy to them but I’ll be able to overdub parts later if necessary.”

Rising Above the Noise

Maybe you’ve come up with a catchy tune and made a great recording of it, but how do you get people to notice? It starts with building a core audience through social media and grass-roots networking. Ranky Tanky’s Ross is a big fan of marketing guru Seth Godin and his “1,000 true fans” concept.

“In every business, but especially in music and art, it’s not about reaching a critical mass where millions of people know you,” he says. “It’s about being a leader among a tribe of 1,000 true fans. We need to focus our efforts on the individual experience and serving that core group.”

Ranky Tanky is a Gullah term meaning to “work it,” and Ross and the band have certainly done that. In addition to the novel concept of adapting the music of Gullah people, slave descendants from the Georgia and South Carolina coast, he also put together a talented ensemble and wrote a detailed business proposal. But a huge factor in the band’s success, at least from a business perspective, was launching the band with four performance videos – something Ross had never done before in his career. The videos allowed them to book several notable performing arts center shows and crowdfund $13,000 to get their first album made.

“The videos were not inexpensive, but they’re an important place to focus whatever resources you do have because it will yield the largest return,” says Ross, who served as the U.S. Jazz Ambassador in 2006. “We really live in a visual time. People really want to see and hear.”

But their biggest bump, the one that led to their ascension atop the Billboard Jazz chart, was done the old-fashioned way: by a hired publicist who got the band an interview with Terry Gross on her NPR program Fresh Air last December. Having a good team to help you is still vital to a band’s success.

Dave Stewart, a longtime radio deejay and programmer who founded the Charleston Music Confab, a multi-genre music conference held each August that the College’s arts management program takes part in, believes DIY should stand for “Delegate It Yourself.”

“Last I checked, there were still only 24 hours in a day,” he says. “Artists can’t spend their entire life learning how to maneuver social media or the ins and outs of YouTube placement or how to get on a Spotify playlist. There’s just not enough time to master all of those elements. You’ve got to put your team together because if you take the time that is required to do everything else, you’re going to be too tired to write a good song.”

And the rest is all for naught without that. That’s why Mark Bryan’s last “In the Mix” series is devoted to performances.

“We’re not going to talk about streaming, we’re not going to talk about licensing,” says program director Chandler. “We did all that. Let’s play, baby. In the end, that’s what it’s all about – the art.”