Premier Business Management

Hard-rockers Krome take one-man band to new level
Band develops own business plan for stardom

Michael McCullough,
Vancouver Sun Newspaper

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

A kind of Cinderella myth -- in which musical acts work on their craft, writing songs and performing in the hope that the music industry will some day discover their talent -- has an enduring grip on wannabe rock stars.

The driving force behind reality TV shows such as American Idol and Popstars is that all you need is talent for fame and fortune to come your way. Of course, for every Kelly Clarkson or Clay Aiken, there are tens of thousands whose dreams are shattered. And even the stars often find themselves boxed in by their record labels.

Shawn Meehan and his hard-rock band Krome prefer not to leave their careers up to fate. Like a growing number of flinty-eyed recording acts -- most notably fellow Vancouver rockers Nickelback -- Krome has gone it alone, releasing its debut compact disc on its own label, making its own videos and getting some airplay on radio and television in the hope of attracting and negotiating major-label support on its own terms.

Now Meehan has gone further, developing a business plan that has already earned Krome a space on the Canadian charts and soliciting investment to further the band's climb toward stardom.

"A lot of musicians have this whole misconception of, 'Oh, art and business don't mix'," says Meehan, 29, a thick-set bear of a man with a purple stripe dyed into his square-cropped goatee.

Having played guitar in other people's bands and worked as a studio musician since leaving high school in Quebec, Meehan formed Krome in the summer of 2002. He wanted to return to his hard-rock roots after years of playing poppier fare.

He and producer Ted Moore started writing songs. To make a demo tape, Moore filled in on bass guitar and brought in a drummer he knew, Doug Grant.

Then Meehan called a young guitarist he knew from Quesnel, Jesson Nelson, to crank up the noise.

The quartet immediately created a buzz.

"I remember getting MP3s of the demo and going, 'Hey, wait a sec, you should make an album of this'," recalled Meehan's friend Rob Mashohn, a self-employed management accountant and sometime musician.

A management company in Toronto arranged two showcases with record labels in Vancouver-area clubs.

"There was a lot of interest, there was nothing negative said, just nobody was willing to cut a cheque," Meehan said. "So we were at this crossroads. We really believed in this project, and even the labels seemed interested."

But instead of breaking up or biding their time on the club circuit, Krome decided to raise some money to record a full album and shoot a video.

"We thought, 'Let's not get down on the fact that the Canadian majors don't want to sign us. Let's look at it as a positive thing that allows us to put out our own music ourselves and be in a little more control of our destiny,'" Meehan said.

Still, it would take more than $20,000 to record an album and make a video for the first single, and Meehan had pretty much tapped out his friends and family. So he and Mashohn formed a record company called Loud Sound Productions Inc., wrote a business plan and started approaching investors. At first, all they had to sell were themselves, a handful of songs and the odd concert.

"We could pull people out to shows. People see the band live and they're hooked," Mashohn said.

The formal corporate structure helps in getting investors to part with their cash, he added.

"They're not just giving money willy-nilly with no record of it. We are a registered corporation in British Columbia and you get a share certificate. We have a law firm you deal with. It's all 100-per-cent legit."

The concept for Loud Sound is not much different than for any other speculative venture. Krome is to Loud Sound what an innovation is to a technology startup, or a mineral claim is to a junior mining company: an asset of uncertain value.

Loud Sound owns the rights to Krome's first and an option on its second CD, and if these prove successful, the label intends to take on other musical acts. That way, should Krome break up, there may still be something there for investors, not to mention a 14-hour-a-day job for Meehan, the president and so far sole employee.

Meehan prefers to think of the best-case scenario in which Krome hits the big time, licenses its albums to a major label for international distribution and splits the revenue with Loud Sound 50-50. If it made sense for shareholders, he'd settle for the next best option, where a major steps in with an offer to buy out Krome's recording contract.

With the first of its investment funds in hand, Krome went into Roper Recordings in Coquitlam in May and recorded its debut CD, Neglected.

Problem No. 1: How to get it on the radio? Meehan began hounding Toronto radio tracker Bobby Gale.

Radio trackers act as agents for artists with the broadcast media. They pitch singles, CDs and videos to radio and television program directors. They set up interviews and live appearances. The major labels have their own in-house trackers, but Gale is considered one of Canada's top independents.

Meehan had sent Gale the CD and repeated e-mail and voicemail messages for two weeks before he heard anything.

"He said, 'Wow, this kid's not going to go away.' He went out on a lunch break, put the CD in and phoned me back after lunch saying, 'Hey, when can we start promoting this record?'" Meehan said.

"That got the ball rolling," Mashohn said. "It happened pretty fast."

Suddenly the band was shooting a video for the first single, Acknowledge, with Meehan producing.

"I have a whole new respect for video producer. I will never second-guess [one of them] . . . It's just so much work," said Meehan, who had previously appeared in half a dozen videos with other bands.

When Gale found out that Meehan was bilingual, he suggested the band record a French version of the song. Hard-rock bands do well in the Quebec market, he reasoned, and French-language radio stations have to play 65 per cent of their music in French.

Sure enough, the French version of Acknowledge, Mourir a Lombre, charted first in Quebec in October, rising as high as No. 18.

In early November, Acknowledge entered the Canadian Top-50 BDS charts at No. 45.

"I know this as a fact: Radio stations are playing us in the West because of being the No. 1 most spun tune on Quebec City's biggest rock station," Meehan said.

Just back from a western tour -- which, to everybody's surprise, turned a modest profit --Meehan is planning a video for the second single, Neglected, and working on his investor relations, ensuring his backers get every radio-play chart and new video to look at. All the while he's had to raise more money to pay Gale and cover the cost of the video, but at least now Loud Sound has something to show for its activities.

"If there's anything we've learned, it's to look ahead," Mashohn said.

Still, radio play itself does not equal revenue. Loud Sound pressed 3,000 copies of Neglected in August, and Krome will have to sell a lot more than that before the company breaks even. Thanks to a recently inked deal with FAB Distribution of Montreal, the CDs are just now hitting store shelves. Loud Sound is just now becoming acquainted with big killer of start-up businesses: Cash flow.

Nonetheless, self-publishing has become increasingly common in the rap, folk and alternative niches of the music industry, usually not out of choice so much as perseverance.

After being turned down by record labels, artists such as Ani DiFranco, Aimee Mann and Bad Religion released their own records, proving that they knew better than the labels what the music-buying public wanted. Vancouver's Nettwerk Productions, among the world's largest independent labels, came about to put out an album for Moev, a gothic-techno band founder Terry McBride then managed.

The trend has now made its way into mainstream rock and roll. Last year Nickelback, which produced and released a number of its own recordings before signing with American independent Roadrunner Records, became only the second Canadian act to have a No. 1 single (How You Remind Me) on the Canadian and U.S. charts simultaneously.

Nickelback's sophomore CD Silver Side Up went on to sell nine million copies worldwide, which helped frontman Chad Kroeger form 604 Records earlier this year. 604 has already produced CDs for bands including Default, The Organ and Theory of a Deadman.

Like Kroeger, Meehan sees no conflict being a rock star and a record executive at the same time, and he appears to have the energy to handle it.

"I love both. I love playing music, writing it, touring . . . At the same time, I love this stuff," he said, gesturing around the office of Mashohn's company Premier Business Management Inc. "I love sitting down with Rob and strategizing and locking in investors. There's a whole excitement to that too."

That's not to say he's thinking about sales when he writes a song, but it may rule out some of his more experimental ideas.

"A lot of bands sometimes don't look at the record company the right way. It's a vehicle to get you where you want to go. You can't look at it as the enemy; you got to look at it as your friend, and as a very good friend. I've learned that from being on the inside, from going, 'Oh my goodness, we're spending a lot of money to sell these CDs.' "

The son of an entrepreneur mother and salesman father, Meehan had been mindful of the commercial side of his musical venture from the outset -- like when it came to a name for the band.

"I was at Music West a couple of years ago when one of my heroes, Gene Simmons, was speaking. Part of his spiel was, 'What's with these names? You guys with these five-word names!' He goes, 'Kiss. Now, you can't forget that name,'" Meehan said.

He vowed his own band would have a simple, one-word name that also conveyed its hard-rock sound. One of his bandmates suggested Chrome, and Meehan changed the spelling to make it more memorable.

mmccullough@png.canwest.com

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BAND WITH A PLAN

Highlights of Loud Sound Production Inc.'s business plan

- Short-term goal: release debut Krome CD, generate air play, sales.

- Long-term goal: "To become a player in the independent Canadian music scene ..."

- Management: One employee -- president Shawn Meehan. Financial and other administrative functions to be contracted.

- Marketing plan: "Totally focused on getting the artists' recordings heard" through promotion of radio air play, live performances, videos.

- Financial plan: To raise about $20,000 by either debt or equity issue during 2003/04.

Ran with fact box "Band with a plan", which has been appended to the end of the story.

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