Starlight Promotions – 4 – My Memoirs – sounds get more selective.

 

So it’s the mid 90’s; Starlight Promotions is up and running and I’m getting busier and busier. The website is getting a lot of hits and I’m learning about sound recordings. I figured out how to put the sounds on the website and I asked the bands to give me one song that I could use so that the customers could listen. I used the Windows sound recorder to pick a part of the song which best reflected the sound of the band or artist. So most of the clips were 60 seconds long. The trick was choosing which 60 secs to record. Sometimes it was the intro. which was the most interesting and at other times it was the guitar riff in the middle or the fantastic drum solo at the end. Choices, choices!

For the party bands, I had the demos. but it was costly to post them out all the time and sometimes I didn’t get them back so the sound clips became more and more important. The sounds of the party bands needed to show their singing and playing abilities whereas the unique,new,Indie bands needed to show off their particular strengths.

So Starlight was evolving. There were the bread and butter songs and then there were the new bands, looking to be famous. I wanted to promote them more even than I wanted to provide music for weddings and parties. At this point I will say that there wasn’t much money in it! It was more of a hobby and a very interesting one at that.

Together with a friend from one of the bands, who I shall call A, we decided to break off the individual band part and set up a record label with our own name. We thought up a name to suit us both. We called it Mangoneworld. I found out how to get a bar-code for the CD. That also proved to be very interesting. Once we had the name, the business and the bar-code, we made a record and assigned it to our own label.

This is it:

 

The band is Grief Society and the song below is called ‘Pin Cushion’. You can buy it or the CD on Itunes.com.

 

Can you let me know please, if the sound thingy works? Thank you.

Oma

 

 

 

In a field near me – July 2014

Last year an experiment began in a field near me. The experiment is being run by a nearby University and is ongoing. The idea of it is to plant up areas of wild flowers in urban areas to see what effect that has on our wildlife. Before the experiment, the field near me was just grass, cut once a week and available for use by the public who live nearby. The main use of it was for children to play football and for dog owners to exercise their pets. I don’t remember seeing anything else much going on there. I wrote about it in a blog post here.

Now here we are a year later and lots of changes have occurred on the ten plots. Looking at them today I can see many more plants and flowers. A lot of the plants from last year are bi-ennials so only came to flower this summer. Here are the plants which have been planted:

Larry got this picture with his camera-phone and took it whilst on his knees in the field. The original belonged to one of the students who was reluctant to part with it today. Tomorrow I’ll see if I can get my own copy, then Larry can take  a better pic. Meanwhile it is good to have because at least the words are clear and we can always to to Wikip… and get a better picture.

The students are handing out survey forms and asking all our neighbours to take a look at the plots and see which ones are most appealing to look at. I can see how important this is because we are all so used to seeing manicured lawns with flat, green grass and nothing much else except the dandelions, daisies and buttercups.

It is so important that we encourage our wildlife to return to our urban spaces that we must learn to find space for them and learn to live with the difference in our environment.

At the moment the plots are slap bang in the middle of the grassy areas but in the longterm I suppose they will be moved to the edges and become part of the landscape.

Starlight Promotions – sounds

This track is a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s song ‘Little Wing’ by the band Flynn who are no longer together.sadly.

It was never sold. This is a demo.

+++

When a potential customer wants to know what a particular band sounds like, they usually ask the agent for a demo. or perhaps a chance to see the band in action. I enjoyed matching the potential customer with the bands. The bands would either send me a demo. cd of their own or a list of where they were playing so that they could be seen. Later on they had their own websites, but at the time I started doing the agency, it was mostly on demos.

As I got further into the agency running I would take samples of their cd’s from their demos and put them on the website. That was fun to do.

I always tried to go and see the bands myself and very often I took a video of them so that I could use some of it for agency purposes. At the time (1990’s) I only had a large video camera, which got heavy to hold after a while. These days all that is so much easier. I now have a small hand-held video camera, which looks like a phone. I can use the videos straight onto my computer, You-tube or wherever. YouTube didn’t exist then.

One of the bands which was busy on the local circuit had a singer who I got to know well. He was one of the ‘good’ band members. He always called me back when he picked up my answer phone messages and always turned up to gigs at the right time. They were reliable. Reliable is a word much prized by entertainment agencies. It’s no good doing all the work to get a band for a customer, only to find at the last minute that they can’t find the venue or they turn up late. After a few times of being let down, I kept a band in reserve. This seemed a good idea and I called upon it once or twice.

The singer I’m talking about, I shall call A. He told me that the band had made a record (CD) with a well-known record company, only to find that it was going to be released in Japan, but not here, not for a while anyway. This was disappointing for the band naturally. We were entering the time of Indie Bands, Indie Record Labels and it was a whole new time.

We decided to set up a record label, YEAH Isn’t that exciting. I’ll tell you about that as we go along, but for now I’ll stay with the agency.

The website was getting more and more hits and often got first placing on Google. That would be very hard to achieve these days!

I found I could see who was visiting the website and get statistics, which were very revealing. From doing that I could see a trend. I began to keep records of the statistics and published them on the site so folk could see.

At around this point I felt that I was doing a lot of work!!! Most of it was in the evenings because I was still doing my day job. It took time to prepare the handouts and keep the website current. I didn’t charge the bands for advertising on my website. That would be illegal. I still think that was unfair but it’s just the way it is. As it happened they were getting free advertising  on a website that was receiving an awful lot of hits, much more than they could hope to get on their own websites.

The way I earned my money was on commission for a sale. Even then sometimes the bands were reluctant to share their earnings. I took 10%. Most agents took 15%. I’m not sure what it is nowadays. I think that with everyone using the Internet so much, there is not much place for agents at all. Perhaps they specialise. I kept only to music, no stripagrams, no jugglers or magicians although later on I did give their names out through other agencies.

to be continued …

 

Starlight Promotions – 2

So during the 90’s I was bringing up teenagers! three boys! and the house was full of guitars and then came the amplifiers; small ones, large ones and my youngest decided to be a bass player and the most enormous amplifier entered the house. There was music in every room, morning, noon and night only not so much in the morning… These were the days before musical downloads. That was in its infancy and we had a lot of CD’s. It was hard to know whose was whose. Where’s my  ….. CD was a frequent cry.

Then there were the practises. Lots of them. Friends coming in and going out and trying out new songs. Luckily the house is detached and nobody here took up the drums. I doubt there would have been room for a drum kit although we did have an electric one.

Meanwhile I am getting gigs for all and sundry and I decided to give ‘myself’ a name and charge commission. So in effect, I became the fifth, sixth or whatever member of the band. I arranged the gigs, took the money and shared it out. I was meticulous with the book-keeping. I was fair to the bands. Entertainment agencies, Estate agencies etc. have a bit of a bad name. I wasn’t having any of that. I was quite honest about it and encouraged the musicians to join the musician’s union if they hadn’t already.

So now I had a set-up. I did most of it by phone. Then I bought a fax machine. Remember those? It was useful at the time. I used the internet and realised that I needed a website. I had no idea about websites then so I did a bit of research. A young lad called Robbie contacted me and offered to make me a website for a reasonable fee.  He was very young, about 16 as I recall. I was amazed at how much he knew. He designed a lovely website for me, mostly blue with pages for all the bands and a contact page – everything I needed at the time.

Then he gave me a playpen so I could practise updating the pages myself.  One of the most important things about a website is that it has to be updated regularly. Nobody wants to read something that appears the same as yesterday. I bought a software programme called Dreamweaver and taught myself how to use it. All exciting stuff.

Once I got the website, things really took off.  I was inundated with demo. discs and biographies from bands, duos and goodness knows what from all over the place. I loved playing the CD’s

So now I had three things going on. I was collecting information from the bands, entering it all on a database – I used Lotus 123 and putting it onto my website. I was receiving enquiries from potential customers and sending them details and prices and I was ‘mothering the bands’ because they aren’t really very good at administration, I discovered.

 

 

to be continued …

 

 

What is life without music?

Music has played a very large part in my life – for pleasure and for work. Since I’ve now upgraded this blog, I can at last share with you my favourite plays.

I want you to enjoy this clip from Estas Tonne. I wonder how many times you will play it over? Once maybe? or perhaps endlessly, like I do.

I am a European and very much keen on passion in music. For me Estas Tonne has it all and I am quite hooked.

See what you think…