BANDING TOGETHER For bet

story by KURT STEIGLEDER

photograph by JUS TIN FORSTER

BANDING TOGETHER

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, LOCAL BANDS ARE FINDING NEW WAYS TO PUBLISH, PROMOTE, AND PRODUCE THEMSELVES WITHOUT THE INDUSTRY’S OLD-GUARD.

“Hey you piece of shit, Jessie Grace, vocalist for the Vancouver-based progressive metal act KOSM affectionately grumbles at one of her young cats. Her cat is currently climbing up her jacket, which is hanging next to the door of the basement suite she and her new husband, Erik, share. “Wow. Problem child.” She laughs, as she sits back down and the cat takes a swipe at her. “But yeah, I don’t really think a lot of people realize how much merch actually costs.” Grace has a lot to say regarding the struggles a modern local band faces to achieve the level that KOSM has reached. They attract strong audiences at every show, accumulated 10,000 likes on their Facebook page, and played the first round of Wacken Metal Battle B.C. 2018, the winner of which earned a slot at the German music festival Wacken, one of the largest heavy metal festivals in the world.

Local bands have much to overcome when starting out: networking with promoters and venues, selling tickets, finding the time to practice, and even just attracting an audience and fanbase. Networking includes going to the shows of other bands in the scene, as this makes it more likely that the members of those bands will reciprocate by attending your band’s shows. But there are further challenges for the local bands that are starting to gain a following: the cost of everything that goes into being a band. That can be gear, merchandise, publicity, artwork, and recording services. Musical instruments can range widely in cost, from a few hundred dollars to thousands. While top-of-the-line gear isn’t always necessary, the metal subgenre that KOSM occupies — progressive metal — is known for its musicians utilizing high-quality gear to create wonderfully hi-fidelity sounds. It makes an excellent listening experience, but it adds an additional monetary barrier to entry for a growing band. Merchandise is another cost that growing bands must take into account. KOSM spent $2,000 for 200-odd T-shirts, and that was for shirts that were simply black and white. When ordering merch, you have to pay more to have more colours present on that particular item. A shirt with five or six colours can cost up to $18 to have made; selling something like that for $20 doesn’t leave much in the way of profit for the band. Bands that self-produce can save money, as a full home recording set-up can be had for under $1,000. However, if you want to contract the services of a talented mix engineer, producer, and an acoustically treated recording studio, that can cost thousands. Shawn Hillman, a member of the Vancouver bands Opus Arise, SVNEATR, Thousand Arrows, and Ysgaroth, personally financed the first Opus Arise record. This cost him $6,000; that’s 1,200 shirts to break even if you’re making $5 per shirt.

Being a local band can come with a high price tag if you’re one of the bands trying to make it, but it’s actually not as bad as it used to be. It’s easier than ever to have your own merch, and as previously mentioned it’s cheaper than ever to record at home. To illustrate this, from Long and McQuade, a Tascam 16x8 recording interface, which converts the analogue signal of musical instruments into a digital signal that a computer can process, can be had for $400. Compare that to the price tag of a Neve 5088, which serves the same basic purpose as the Tascam 16x8, with the difference being that the Neve uses analogue technology; and it’s roughly $150,000. It also requires an entire room dedicated to housing it, compared to the Tascam 16x8 which plugs neatly into a laptop in your bedroom.

While most bedrooms might not give studio-quality sound due to reflections, carpet deadening of soundwaves, and background noise, this is not always the case. The vocal recordings for KOSM’s debut album were actually produced in three locations: a studio, Grace’s home, and the band’s practice space, which allowed her to record in whichever environment made her most comfortable. KOSM

also uses file-sharing services regularly just to bounce around musical ideas. For Grace, technology has been a massive contributor to KOSM’s success.

And technology has its fingers in more than just the creation of music, but also its distribution. Services like Qrates even let bands press their own vinyl records, which was something that earlier bands simply could not do, short of starting their own label. A subscription to DistroKid is $19.99 USD a year, and it allows bands to self-publish their music to a multitude of online platforms. Taken together with Qrates, DistroKid makes the need for a record label almost a thing of the past.

An argument can be made that record labels aren’t quite dead just because musicians can self-publish, because a label promotes its artists, which does have real value. However, yet another tool has appeared to gut the remaining value of the record label: social media. “I think that you can’t be a band if you don’t have social media.” Grace authoritatively stated when asked about the role social media plays in KOSM’s success. “This is the age of the Internet, the age of social media. There are old-school metalheads that don’t think that they need it… but it’s crucial…. We have 10,000 likes on Facebook. That number, as much as we don’t want it to be, is a large portion of the opportunities we get. People see that number, they see that we have a following, and they give us those opportunities because they know that we can sell something.” Being social mediasavvy has its clear benefits, but not all bands are adapting.

A band Grace brought up had its start several decades prior to KOSM, but only has 9,000 likes on Facebook to KOSM’s 10,000 after two active years. This illustrates how younger bands are adapting to the Internet-fuelled present better than their artistic forebears. However, social media needs to be used correctly, as evidenced by a recent controversy Grace herself accidentally caused. Several months ago, she casually posted on Facebook a comment consisting of, “When you find out a band in Victoria is also named KOSM and refuses to change their name.

Not cool, guys. Indignant members of the Vancouver metal scene embarked on a witch hunt against the Victoria band that dared to use the same name, including sending them hate messages. Grace had to make several THE ACCESSIBILITY OF NEW AND AFFORDABLE TOOLS LIKE DISTROKID AND QRATES ALLOWS LOCAL BANDS TO RECORD, PUBLISH AND PROMOTE THEMSELVES, BUT UNFORTUNATELY THEY CAN CAUSE ANOTHER ISSUE: OVERSATURATION.

public Facebook statements asking people within the Vancouver scene to lay off the other band, and the members of KOSM even reached out afterwards to let the other band — which has since changed its name — know that they would be willing to help them get connected with the Vancouver scene if they ever needed it. KOSM wanted to fix the damage that had been unintentionally done, and Grace even came out in defense of the Victoria band, making very clear that she hadn’t intended to evoke such a strong response from the Vancouver scene, she had just been venting — but it’s a clear lesson in how powerful social media can be, even on a small scale. Grace is now deliberately less vocal on social media due to this incident.

The accessibility of these new tools allows local bands to record, publish and promote themselves, but they are are not purely positive, and may cause another issue: oversaturation. In the pre-Internet age, a music listener had limited access to music. There were physical releases in local music stores, whatever was played on the radio, and the local live music scene. Compare that to now — with a tap on a screen audiences can access literally thousands of artists, and for such a small cost in comparison. “The bands don’t really get paid what they’re worth,” Grace stresses about streaming services. Spotify is free with ads, or ad-free with a $10 subscription. Compared to a $10 album, the choice for the consumer is easily made. But this hurts artists; Spotify only pays between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream. That’s less than a penny per song play. To put that into perspective, a fan would need to listen to a 10-song album more than 160 times for the artist to earn a measly $10 at the base rate. And even if a band has managed to amass a number of such die-hard and dedicated fans, roughly 70 per cent of the income from Spotify streams goes to rights-holders, such as an artist’s record label, publisher, and distributor. Consider the 2014 controversy with Taylor Swift publicly complaining how little she earns from streaming platforms. Swift racked up millions of plays on Spotify, meaning her per-play income would have been close to the cap of $0.0084, but her Spotify revenue was nothing compared to what she would have made from a comparable number of album sales. She felt that her art was being actively devalued by streaming platforms, and considering that she was making at most $0.0084 per play, that’s not an unreasonable statement. In light of the growing adoption of streaming services, this is an issue that affects artists at every level of popularity, and it’s not going away.

There are very real challenges for bands at the local level, but who’s to say that in a few years those challenges will even exist? Digital audio workstations, which make recording music infinitely more accessible, first gained popularity in the early 2000s; no longer were recording desks costing thousands of dollars absolutely required for music production. DistroKid was only founded in 2013, Spotify in 2006, and iTunes was first released in 2001. That means that over the last 20 years bands still had to rely on a record label to deliver their artistic creations to their fans, but starting six years ago bands suddenly had a way to reliably circumvent that decades-old institution.

Instagram, one of the most popular social media networks in the world and a major platform for bands to promote themselves, launched in October of 2010. Within the last decade the number of tools that bands have at their disposal have exploded, but those tools have then created their own issues — like needing to be very careful with what you say online. All that can truly be said of the challenges that local bands face is that within the next few years, what bands are dealing with will probably be significantly different. The real struggle for bands is finding ways to adapt. ■