Talent Scouting: Watch The Crowd, Not The Stage
I love the image of the iconic record label talent scout who spends evenings in smokey bars watching up-and-coming bands and recognizing natural talent after a single song. Even with no one in the audience, the star power is so apparent that the A&R scout takes the band to dinner and tries to sign them on the spot. This romantic vision is certainly fun to think about but there is a missing piece of the equation.
Speaking candidly with A&R and label reps there are other places good scouts need to be looking besides the stage. They need to be looking in the crowd. The power of a band is in writing songs that connect with, communicate, and inspire their fans. A set is only as good as the response it elicits. Some of us have been lucky enough to watch when a young band electrifies a room. It’s a powerful feeling. But we’ve all watched talented musicians who fail to ignite the audience. It’s uncomfortable.
While it used to take an army of scouts at the local venues to keep an ear to the ground, we now have a new avenue to observe how the crowd responds to an artist. Instead of having to watch people at a show to see how the music is received, the Internet allows us to see how people act in the comfort of their own room or office without the alcohol and social pressures of a concert.
What artists are they streaming on Youtube and MySpace? What videos are they watching on Vevo? What bands are they liking on Facebook and looking up on Wikipedia to learn more about? We don’t need to run focus groups or poll anyone – we just need to constantly monitor the pages of artists to see how many people are aware of the band, take the time to explicitly look them up, engage deeper with the artist and ultimately show their commitment financially.
Since computers are not able to feel the energy in a local venue, and with more people making music now than ever before, using certain filters can help narrow down which artists are worthy of deeper investigation. At first it may feel cold to track artists based on their online numbers but as the vast majority of music consumption moves online – it’s simply watching the crowd…something good A&R scouts have done for years.
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Posted by Alex White
on Mar 13 2011. Filed under Digital, featured, Labels.
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“Even with no one in the audience, the star power is so apparent that the A&R scout takes the band to dinner and tries to sign them on the spot.”
In all fairness, that is how John Hammond discovered Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman and many others. There are many stories of him spending hours in clubs every night reading the New York Times till someone came on stage that caught his interest. I wonder what he would have thought about using computer to A&R. – Betweenthelinernotes.com
… then again in reality this isn’t such a good measuring stick either. There are some good bands which do not have a good online prescence. Also the response artists get are very skewed by gender. Females are more pleasant and positive in feedback whereas males are more interested in flaming and being negative. In a real life situation where young males aren’t flexing thier fake internet muscles and females are at an actual risk of being talked to by a real person the responses are more measured. Lastly the internet buzz is not long lived, by the time you move on something interest may have faded. My advice to the few A&R people remaining; look for real talent and good songwriting 2 things which will never fail in the long run.
~ CrowfeatheR
I think the use of social media in A&R is much more important in finding the bands in the first place. Certianly that is the case here in the UK. Also I think good A&R’s know not to be fooled or mislead by a band’s youtube/myspace hits, it can be interesting data but it can always be very misleading. This is one of the reasons that noone in the music industry has giving a f*ck about myspace numbers for years. It’s very easy for someone to get hits on a site, or build up ‘friends’ on twitter or myspaz, it’s a lot harder to convince fans to buy tickets / records, to vote for tracks on polls, to call radio shows etc etc. If a band is connecting with fans then that is normally very obvious from the reactions at shows (probably the most important factor) as well as the reaction and uptake in other areas, in the blogosphere and on radio in particular.
I think this article was dashed off a little too quickly. Having been in A&R at a major label for 3.5years and in the music industry for almost 10 I think that pretty much any scout, even the most inept, are way ahead of you. We all cottoned on to this 5 or 6 years ago!!!
Solid perspective and IMO, exactly correct
Hi, some good points execpt AR people seem to forget – You can not gauge future record sales based on web ‘hits’. An unsigned band may have 50,000 followers on the internet, but have only 10 people actually leave their computer, pop on a bus and actually pay in to see a band play