Music Marketing the McDonald's Way

Face it. Unless you get millions of streams on Spotify or YouTube, the return you get for paying a curator to force your music onto playlists has questionable value. So why bother?

Many don't so what other options are available to get your great song track heard? How do you gain loyal fans and followers that motivate you to keep jamming and creating more fire?The traditional method, of course, was to tour, sell CD's and pay for advertising--the holy trinity of music promotion. Today, the goalposts are constantly moving with covid limiting performances. Yep. It's still out there lurking big time.

I remember the first time that I ever met a music promoter in the flesh. I was managing an RV resort in New Mexico and this squat little guy pulls up to the office in a beat up Dodge, leaves the engine running and rushes into the office with posters, flyers and demo CD's pushing some lame Country & Western band touring the Southwest whose name he dropped and I forgot. Really, he looked like some door-to-door salesman pushing a product that nobody wanted or needed and now the whole scene reminds me of Michael Keaton in the movie, The Founder--the flip side story of how the burger franchise, McDonald's got started. I felt sorry for the guy but little did I know that the owner of the resort would soon ask me to do the same thing.

He had a jones for this banjo player called Mean Mary who was actually very good and a keen performer with a cool personality. He wanted her to play at the resort or some other venue in that little scat town and I had to either set up a venue or find one. Most of time, I got flat out rejected. Nobody would even hear me out but at least I got free lunches at some nice restaurants charged to his account for being out and about. 

Now Country & Western is not my go to genre, but hey, as the song goes, "I like music, any kind of music" so long as it's done well.  But I'll never forget talking to a theatre manager (which was not a cold lead), thinking I would wrap a deal, get Mary booked and win kudos from my boss for some reason. It seemed like a sure thing, a slam dunk, and I was ready to pop the champagne. We got on the Internet in his office and he listened to about 30 seconds of the song (the average play time for most streaming music listeners) and cut the clip and said, "I can't sell out the place on that." So I learned a few things which stuck with me through the years, not only as a home product salesman and half hearted book promoter later, but as an aspiring music biz man today:

1. People like to buy but not get sold.

2. You have to get a lot of no's out of the way before you find a yes.

3. Product is important but persistence is more important. After all, McDonald's sucks but they still sell billions of cow pies around the world regularly.

4. Build an image and a brand and keep it strong. Make your God given face recognizable.

5. Pray for constant blessings and guidance because I'm pretty sure that angels like to bump and rock as the rest of us.

And finally, everything you do, do for the glory of God and to promote His gig!

Breakfast with Newsboys' Peter Furler

 So it was a dream, probably because I've been featuring a lot of Australian singers on this blog lately here and here and my band's singer is also from the Land Down Under. Add that to the fact that it was early morning and I was pretty hungry so not only does the dream make for a cool reminder about the power of music but it also translates into an easy blog post. Here's the back story.

After my conversion a few years ago, I discovered the solid preaching of the late British evangelist, Martin Lloyd-Jones. He was a medical doctor who never attended a single bible class but gave up his lucrative London practice in his twenties to answer God's call to preach in a dirt poor, coal mining town in Wales. Eventually, he ended up taking the pulpit back in the capitol at Westminster, the iconic Puritan sanctuary. His preaching began in earnest on September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland, and he was able to reach a countless number of English speaking troops passing through England on their way to the front. I recommend any one of his 1600 plus sermons digitally remastered from tape. Listening to them day and night really strengthened my understanding of Scripture but there is an emotional aspect to this walk of faith that needed to be fleshed out. 

Martin Lloyd-Jones

Enter Peter Furler and the Newsboys.

I was of course aware of their music beforehand but their songs just seemed to have come alive for me in Dolby Atmos sound. The band's energy and lyrics, planted against the backdrop of my new appreciation of the Word, lifted me to great heights of inspiration and the enthusiasm caught on as is typical for those who have met Jesus and are dying to tell others like the woman at the well in Samaria who left her water pot and rushed into town to spread the news that the Messiah had arrived.

Long story short, we literally became the Newsboys in our rural communities in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and drove around listening to Christian rock full blast, throwing flyers with gospel tracts tied to them onto lawns, leaving them on doorsteps, placing them in the parks and rest stops where visitors from all over the USA would come to enjoy the beauty of Lake Superior and its surroundings in the summer. We must have delivered thousands while stopping to talk and pray with people when we could. Soon thereafter, we had the privilege of seeing the Newsboys when they toured the upper Midwest and the fellowship and joy we experienced as part of that musical evangelistic campaign was what I told Furler about in my dream. But it seems like he was hungrier than I was and only kept asking for more ham and eggs! Now that's humility!

Me and my Jesus posse in Michigan

(this clip is not for profit but educational use only)