On
the city’s letterhead and bumper stickers, Austin is the “Live Music Capital of the World.” But what if we were
merely charming instead? When word leaked out this past March that city
planners were considering changing Austin’s official slogan to “Experience the
C.H.A.R.M. [Culture, Heritage, Arts, Recreation, and Music] of Austin,” local
clubowners, musicians, and industry leaders sat up and took notice. After all,
city-sponsored propaganda has been boasting the city’s thriving music scene
since 1991, and even though Austin’s official slogan has long been the butt of
jokes within the local music community (“Live Music Capital? They won’t even
let musicians load-in on Sixth Street.”), why change it now? Getting paid lip
service is better
than not getting paid at all.
As it wound up, the potential slogan switch was only a rumor — traceable back
to the Austin Convention & Visitor’s Bureau (ACVB) and their adoption of
the C.H.A.R.M. tag for their own operations. Ultimately, the city’s slogan
supersedes ACVB’s, but in the face of losing its title, Austin has apparently
begun a dialogue about what it truly means to be living and working in the
“Live Music Capital of the World.” While the slogan debate itself may be over,
the discussion of how to market Austin has apparently only just begun.
Ironically, to hear what the city’s “Music Liaison” Bob Meyer has to say about
marketing the musical lifestyle in Austin, a trip to Richmond, Virginia might
be in order. It seems that Meyer has become somewhat of a commodity on the
national music lecture circuit — advising other city governments on how best
to market their music scene — prompting his role as a featured speaker at the
“Route 1” music conference in Richmond last April.
“I told them Austin’s a pretty unique environment, but that we’ve tried to
create an embrace between the local music industry, city government, and the
business community,” says Meyer, who actually works within the ACVB. “The theme
of my speech was a united front and that everybody’s piece of the pie is going
to get bigger if the whole pie is bigger.”
Playing the Market While few would argue with the gist of Meyer’s Richmond speech, some local
music industry leaders began whispering questions about what Meyer could
possibly teach other cities when Austin itself seems to lack a solidified
marketing campaign of its own. Was Meyer’s speech a sign that Austin has a
marketing plan outside of Titty Bingo’s city-wide bumper sticker campaign?
Actually, insiders say it’s not that Austin music isn’t marketed, rather it’s
the city’s scattershot approach to PR which lacks a unified feel and therefore
the all-around “embrace” that Meyer talks about.
Perhaps not coincidentally, then, ACVB and Meyer’s office made their own first
steps at creating a cohesive music marketing plan for Austin last March as
well. At that time, ACVB Executive Director Karen Jordan invited a handful of
local music industry leaders to help craft the “first ACVB and City of Austin
Music Liaison Office Marketing Plan.” In her cover letter, Jordan asked
participants to consider a plan that markets Austin music to “conventions and
tourists to promote economic development of the music-associated businesses in
and to Austin.” Additionally, Jordan told the participants that the ACVB wanted
to market “Austin as a music industry `Mecca’; a viable home-base for artists
and industry alike.”
The results, by all accounts, was a freestyle discussion of existing and
future strategies. Among the suggestions were plans for improved
literature/brochure advertising, more “theme” events, and a marketing survey of
Austinites who don’t go out. And although the full unedited comments have
already been redistributed to the participants of the meeting as a nine-page
document, Meyer and Jordan say a streamlined, formal version will be unveiled
in October as part of ACVB’s general marketing plan.
Yet even with the city’s first marketing plan nearing the table — and the
potential end to Austin’s semi-successful “Build it and they will come” policy
— Meyer and his critics already agree that putting the plan into action could
wind up a slow process tangled with heated debate. Still, both sides agree that
any unified plan should be better than the city’s “Chocolate Disc” blunder of
1992, when the ACVB proposed spending more money on promotional, edible CDs
than what it would have cost to produce real CDs that featured Austin talent.
But how exactly does one sell a scene? According to Dr. Philip Zerrillo, a
marketing professor at the University of Texas, the principals must first agree
on what’s being sold. “Most of marketing’s early work, strategies, and
literature focus on marketing products — like a can of soda,” says Zerrillo.
“But as we move into marketing something less tangible — services — we’re
dealing more with marketplace perceptions and tastes that are much more latent
and much harder to change. So it’s very important for something like a music
community to talk about how they want to portray themselves, what they want to
stress, and what part of an overall market they’re trying to attract.”
Whereas reaching a consensus from Austin’s multitude of club owners and
musicians about how and what facets of the local scene should be spotlighted in
a marketing campaign is about as easy as nailing the Republican Party down on a
unified platform, the city at least has an infrastructure to deal with the
issue.
At the local level, Music Liaison Meyer has been mandated by the city and the
ACVB to “enhance, assist, and promote the music industry in Austin,” while also
serving as staff support for the eight-member, business-oriented Austin Music
Commission, which reports its findings on the local scene to the City Council.
Meanwhile, at the state level, Texas Music Office (TMO) Director Casey Monahan
is in charge of promoting the development of the state’s music industry via an
information and resource campaign/database out of the governor’s office. Unlike
Meyer, however, Monahan is forbidden by law to initiate contact with state
legislators, and is also less interested in tourism affairs because the state
already maintains the Department of Tourism for in-state tourism and the
Department of Commerce for national tourism campaigns.
For the present, then, any marketing of Austin music will likely fall into
Meyer’s hands — an idea that has many of the same folks that are critical of
the city’s seemingly non-existent marketing plan wondering what exactly it is
Meyer already does.
The City Beat
“My job is not purely marketing,” says Meyer of his Austin Music Liaisontitle. “Aside from the staffing and operation of the Music Commission, I see it
as both an ombudsman role for the local community’s dealings with city
government, and as a job that monitors the overall health of the music industry
— which in turn impacts its marketability.”
Both Meyer and Jordan, who oversees Meyer’s efforts at the ACVB, are quick to
say that the major obstacle thus far in widening Meyer’s music marketing
efforts has been the lack of funds put aside for his division. “When you get
right down to it, Bob’s got about $5,000 a year to work with,” says Jordan,
“which means you can’t go anywhere and can’t do much in the way of publications
or brochures.”
One way of adding to Meyer’s coffers may be the ACVB’s privatization, which
the City Council recently approved, making Meyer the only ACVB employee still
on the city’s payroll. According to Jordan, privatization not only increases
ACVB’s ability to raise money and attract larger corporate sponsors, it also
frees up Meyer to dip into those new funds for what she calls “music-oriented
promotion.” And although both Meyer and the ACVB strongly contend that the
Music Liaison job itself isn’t in question for now, critics of privitization
fear it eventually would be because Meyer, will, in effect, have no one at the
city and state level to answer to, and by extension no one to back him and his
causes.
Nevertheless, Meyer says he’s hoping to ride out his department’s own internal
privatization debate by focusing on the promotion of his office’s big two
causes: the Music Industry Loan Guarantee Program and the Instrument Loan
Program. The former program, detailed in these pages last year (“Brother, Can
You Spare a Dime,” Vol XIV, No. 20), helps music-related businesses in Austin
with low-interest loans, while the latter provides local school children with
musical instruments. According to Meyer, both programs already help Austin
market its music scene.
The Instrument Loan Program for example, through the use of television and
radio ads that feature Asleep at the Wheel’s Ray Benson and Jimmie Vaughan,
promotes the local scene by making people think about music. “Our promotion of
events hopefully winds up impacting on different levels,” says Meyer. “For
instance, with June Is Jazz month we use our funds for brochures and
advertising, supporting the Clarksville [Jazz Festival] by buying space in
their program, and then in turn using these materials to attract visitors
either to the promotion itself while they’re in town or to drum up business at
the hotels. And because June is a shitty time of the year for Austin hotels,
it’s also been calculated to impact at that level as well.”
Meyer says he’s also working on a video presentation the city can use at trade
shows to promote Austin music, as well as the publication of several new
brochures. “We’re almost ready to publish the `101 Musical Things To Do In
Austin’ brochures,” says Jordan. “Not only will it be helpful for encouraging
the visitor to check out the Austin clubs, but it should also help break down
the perception that Sixth Street is just a place for college kids to drink. So
we’ll be pushing Austin on the fact that you don’t have to be under 25 to enjoy
Sixth Street while attracting new visiting clientele as well.”
As its moniker suggests, the ACVB is concerned first and foremost with
convention and tourist clientele. In 1994, when Jordan came on as the bureau
director, she hired KGSR deejay Kevin Connor as the bureau’s Austin Music
Entertainment Specialist, a job that was intended to complement Meyer’s work
and one geared mostly towards enticing tourists and conventioneers into the
clubs once in Austin.
“When Karen got here, she had the insight to be amazed at the city’s slogan
and their failure to truly capitalize on it,” says Connor, who turned the job
over to local music industry veteran Kristen Nagel when he left for a radio gig
in California. Although Nagel wound up leaving the job shortly thereafter, the
now-defunct position pushed the marketing envelope back to Meyer and left a
legacy that the Music Liaison says he now spends a day a week fulfilling with a
hotel fax campaign listing shows in local clubs that hotel concierges feel
comfortable recommending to their guests.
“It’s free for the hotels and costs the office itself nothing, so it’s a
win-win,” says Meyer, who claims the older demographic base at the hotels
prohibits him from recommending anything more adventurous than, say, Kris McKay
at the Hole in the Wall. “We get to put the focus on the clubs, and have the
hotels and meeting planners get great feedback from their guests in the
process.”
Additionally, the ACVB hopes that Austin’s marketing campaign will eventually
leave the city on the backs of those it’s trying to promote — literally, via a
T-shirt campaign for touring musicians. This idea appears in the aforementioned
unedited meeting notes of the ACVB’s summit with local music industry players,
and suggests touring musicians wear “Live Music Capital Of The World” T-shirts
while on the road.
“Whether we’re talking about recordings or touring, the greatest economic
impact on our scene can come from exporting the product,” says Meyer, who
previously reported to the Economic Development division of the Planning &
Development. “When artists make money on the road, that’s money that is made
somewhere else and spent here in Austin.”
But what about when that money is made here and spent here ? Or Meyer’s theory
that a thriving local scene is the key to marketing Austin’s live music? “Long
ago it came to our attention that we could market things better on Sixth Street
if our musicians weren’t being dragged off in handcuffs,” says Meyer. “I’ve
been a musician for 40 years, so I know the most important thing we can do is
put money in the pockets of musicians. When a musician is afforded the
opportunity to make money, everybody makes money because they’re at the bottom
of the food chain; they’re the one paying the sales tax, putting money back
into the scene, and creating something tourists want to come and participate
in.”
Although Meyer and the Music Commission routinely meet with and lobby local
police and planning decision-makers, Meyer is also aware that the general
perception of local clubowners and musicians is that he has little or no effect
on the day-to-day life of the musician. “There’s still a lot of people who
don’t think they’re being adequately served, but often these are regulatory
problems, not policy problems,” says Meyer, who vows the load-out policies and
weekend barricading of Sixth Street are the next local issues he’ll be
concentrating on.
Furthermore, Meyer insists that the proof his efforts can work lies in the
newly relaxed relationship between fire officials and clubowners — factions
that in the past were at constant odds over club capacities, but now seem to be
collaborating to improve space configurations and thereby legally increase
occupancy.
“These kinds of things are about making the political structure aware of how
it all works within the music industry so they can be in tune with it,” says
Meyer. “And so as much as we complain about politicians, or me being part of
the machinery, in seven years, the city has become pretty receptive and pretty
responsible to the needs of the music community. Oftentimes, the best idea for
me is to sit back quietly and educate and listen to both sides — the music
industry and the government.”
More involved in local music industry politics is the Music Commission, which
oddly seats no musicians, but has been generally credited with being more
active in its local scene involvement since National Academy of Recording Arts
and Sciences (NARAS) local chapter president Carlyne Majer took over the
chairperson position last year from embattled promoter French Smith. “It takes
a cohesive local industry to attract the attention and respect of council and
city officials and they do take the commission seriously,” says commission
member David Brichler of Lone Wolf Management. “The answers to the problems
musicians face may not be answered immediately, but the forum and the ability
to be heard certainly exists within the liaison office and the commission.”
Meyer himself admits it’s hard to gauge the success of his office or the
commission, but that looking at local music industry business itself may be the
only reliable indicator. “There’s action in the clubs, bands working, and
entire scenes like the retro-jazz thing surfacing and drawing new people to the
clubs,” says Meyer. “Then you’ve got the list of people touring and the growth
in the retail businesses like record stores and equipment shops. How much can
you attribute that to city interaction? I’m not sure, but we obviously hope our
activities enhance it. Either way, we get 12-15 calls a day here from people
out of town asking about Austin music and luckily, there’s plenty to tell them
and recommend.”
The State of Affairs
There’s a good chance many of Meyer’s calls come forwarded by Casey Monahan,Director of the Texas Music Office (TMO) and compiler of a database of over
5,000 music-related businesses in Texas. Opened in 1990, Monahan’s office began
with a state legislative mandate that he “inform members of the industry and
the public about the resources available in the state for music production.”
“It works two ways,” says Monahan, who represents music interests in all of
Texas, but is based in Austin. “I’m here to assist Texas business in finding
markets in-state and out-of-state for their product — or music — and to
assist non-Texas businesses in finding products and services within Texas. But
I’ve taken the widest possible interpretation of what the legislature meant by
`music production’ in their mandate, because if you assist an indie record
store, musician, or equipment dealer, eventually, through their needs, you’ve
assisted everybody else in the business.”
The indisputable center of Monahan’s campaign is the Texas Music Industry
Directory — often dubbed “The White Pages” of Texas music — which
compiles everything having to do with Texas music, from music programs at local
schools and karaoke rentals to local studios, labels, and musicians. “What the
book does is put a face on the industry every year, making everybody available
to each other because they deal in the same product,” says Monahan. “Like it or
not, Antone’s Records and Muzak are in the same business and employ, cater to,
and serve people in the music industry.”
Although the book also features a definitive calendar of annual Texas music
events, Monahan’s office is more interested in creating business opportunities
than stimulating tourism. Taken as a whole, however, the Texas Music
Industry Directory, along with Monahan’s day-to-day activities — guiding
fans, journalists, and professionals to sections of the directory that will
help them find the Texas business that best meets their needs — is pure
marketing. TMO spreads the word about Texas music via telephone, modem, mail,
fax, and photocopy at a cost far below the advertising components of similar
campaigns.
“Because no other government entity anywhere is trying to do what we’re doing
with music,” explains Monahan, “I spend a good deal of time researching the
marketing efforts of professional trade associations and the directories they
publish. The trick was determining what was needed and what services people
expected from their industry, which made looking at the National Association of
Music Teachers book as important as ASCAP’s.”
Along with collecting information on young artists and new businesses, the TMO
also concentrates on an active file of over 450 international contacts that
have expressed interest in Texas music — many of whom Monahan has met
personally in France at the MIDEM convention and exposition.
“My biggest days of the year are at MIDEM,” says Monahan. “MIDEM is the
world’s largest music industry convention and therefore the premiere marketing
event of the year for Texas music. In 1986, Texas attendees banded together to
form a presence and inform the other attendees about Texas labels, publishers,
producers, musicians, and attorneys, with a stand on the trade show floor. It’s
[the TMO’s] job to reserve the space and administer the stand fairly between
the companies that help pay for it. But it’s also become the best way for
Texans to beef up their Rolodexes, and we provide marketing info in advance to
our foreign contacts about the companies attending — whether they’re booth
registrants or not.”
Unfortunately, the MIDEM booth may be a prime example of marketing’s expenses
outweighing what the city or state is willing to offer. In a best-case
scenario, say some insiders, Monahan wouldn’t have to sell booth space and any
Texas music industry representative willing to fly to France and register could
use the Texas booth as their homebase for promotion, marketing, and meetings.
“I’d like to see the MIDEM booth become more available to the smaller labels
or independent businessman,” says former SXSW Director Louis Meyers, who cites
the efforts of Texas delegates manning a New Music Seminar trade show booth in
the mid-Eighties with creating the promotional push behind SXSW’s launch.
“Casey has to sell off these spaces to out-of-state labels like Pravda and
HighTone because the booth’s considered too expensive for the state to pay for
and the slots Casey’s offering are too expensive for the average Texas
business. And yet, for what could be the single best promotional effort by the
state to market Austin, there’s never been an effort to raise the money here to
buy the booth and open it up to a better cross-section of the state’s
businesses.”
Testing the Market Place
What can be learned from Texas’ early marketing efforts? Bernard Cyruss of theLouisiana Music Commission — perhaps the only real equivalent to Monahan and
Meyer’s offices in another state — says the efficiency debate over how Texas’
booth at MIDEM is used and what Meyer is doing to settle police/clubowner
friction are tools he can use in his own state’s marketing strategies.
“We’ve found marketing to be an uphill battle, especially because the tendency
is to under-fund local efforts and concentrate on tourism instead,” says
Cyruss, who is also a working Louisiana musician. “If you put `tourism’ in the
plan they cut the check. But if you don’t nourish the local industry there is
no tourism. What we’ve got to constantly stress as a commission is that it’s
more than the guy with the fiddle they flash on in a Louisiana TV campaign;
it’s also the guy making the fiddle, running the sound, and selling the
product.”
But while Meyer and the Music Commission are perhaps more artist-oriented than
the city’s own tourism campaigns, some local clubowners and musicians say they
fear the trickle-down effects of tourism-based marketing may never reach all
the way down to the musicians if clubowners frustrated with city policies and
dwindling crowds take their business out of the city altogether. In fact,
Backyard and Austin Music Hall owner Tim O’Connor told a June gathering of the
city’s Street Closure Task Force that one of the reasons he opted to open the
Backyard in Bee Caves rather than Austin was to avoid the city’s music-related
red tape.
“The powers that be in Austin say one thing nationally with their marketing
campaigns and do things different locally,” says O’Connor, who wound up placing
the Austin Music Hall in its namesake town and reports no recurring, major city
roadblocks. “And with decibel debates, Auditorium Shores’ sound problems, and
street closure issues, it’s become increasingly difficult for commercial
promoters to feel comfortable working within the city limits. If promoters feel
Sixth Street or Auditorium Shores isn’t viable anymore, they might just take
their business somewhere more hospitable 30 miles to the south.”
Meyer contends that through his contacts with the police and planning
departments and the Music Commission’s recommendations to the city council,
fewer clubs or promoters should be considering leaving town. Yet even with the
Backyard in Bee Caves, a well-marketed Austin music scene can still profit from
businesses outside the city limits. “We’ve still got people staying in the
hotels, eating in town, and walking down to Sixth Street afterwards,” says
Meyer.
Which brings up another question: What’s being done to market Austin music to
the people that actually live on Austin’s outskirts or just out of town but
rarely travel in for live entertainment?
“One of the goals of ACVB has got to be to bring the people outside of
[Highway] 183 in town more often,” says Kevin Connor. “It’s the same 5,000
people in the clubs every couple of nights. And as for tourism, without turning
into Branson, Missouri [whose city slogan also boasts “The Live Music Capital
of the World”], everybody could make a better living if the music industry
better understood the tourism industry. The question is how to let people in
town for a convention know that for a $3 cab ride they can see 81/2
Souvenirs or Toni Price at the Continental’s happy hour. This way, the tourist
buys the product and eventually tells their friends they’d come away having a
generally great time.”
But even with happy tourists, and the Music Commission’s plans to get to the
tourists earlier by providing actual live music and events calendars at the new
airport, there’s a faction of local industry leaders that says too much of the
City’s marketing efforts are lost in a gray area between selling Austin in
general for tourism purposes and selling the live music scene specifically.
Gordon Caldwell of the Tennessee Film, Music, and Entertainment Commission
says that his group has finally found that the only real way to market his
state’s interests are to consciously combine and complement both campaigns. “I
thinks Austin’s probably dealing with the same gray area we are” says Caldwell.
“While it’s easy to get your plan lost when the elements come together so
naturally, it’s also easy to make a wider impact. Beale Street is not only a
tourist attraction, it’s also home to blues clubs, blues labels, and blues
artists like B.B. King, who’s a regular performer, studio customer, and venue
owner.
“When German TV comes and we give them B.B. King, not only do we thrive
locally from the attention, but we’ve passed work onto the local film community
who supports the shoot. By watching our local strengths, building them up, and
marketing them outwards, the gray area begins to work for everybody.”
ACVB insiders say just how a new marketing plan will ultimately handle this
gray area is still a gray area itself, given the bureau’s own ongoing
privatization debate and Meyer’s current funding problems. And although there’s
been no guarantee that any of the findings from a series of invitation-only
marketing meetings currently underway will see the light of day in the new
plan, UT’s marketing expert Zerrillo says that because Meyer, Monahan, and the
Music Commission are already established, Austin’s live music scene may have
already cleared one of marketing’s biggest hurdles: legitimization.
“Not only do you have to be creative and better understand your market to sell
a scene,” says Zerrillo, “but you often need the legitimization that a
relationship with the city planners can offer. This way, tourists have a place
to go for information, those offices are in place for facilitating the
resulting business, and the reputations of those offices can carry the weight
necessary to be taken more seriously than a call from “XYZ Company” about
spending money on Austin music.”
In fact, Meyer’s pitch to Richmond may have already sold Austin based on the
legitimization factor alone. “His speech truly galvanized our scene,” says
Richmond Studio owner Terry Straud, who will visit Austin later this year with
a group of Richmond music industry leaders on a marketing fact-finding mission.
“His speech really got our attention and has convinced many of us to pool our
resources and really try to market our scene and talent.”
And what did Meyer tell them that’s perhaps indicative of how Austin’s own
first full-fledged marketing campaign may shape up? “I told them that if the
local community understands the importance of music’s economic impact and that
dollars and creativity go hand in hand, a marketing program with reasonable and
specific goals can work for a city and its scene. It’s simply putting your best
foot forward. That’s what salesmanship is all about.” n
This article appears in September 6 • 1996 and September 6 • 1996 (Cover).