16 Music Week 21.11.14 INTERVIEW ABOVE & BEYOND
it could go further, but if it doesn’t I could do something else. I thought I’ll give it two years, let’s see how we go.’” The gamble paid off and thanks to a lucrative
publishing deal from Warner Holland for Oceanlab – another alias the trio released music under – they were able to sustain a living. “We were doing so many things, the label was growing, our DJ dates were growing and becoming more lucrative, we were doing some quite highly paid remixes and it was underground music that we saw ourselves in,” adds Grant. Realising that they were giving away all of
their best ideas when doing remixes for labels including Manifesto, Warner and Positiva, Grant, McGuinness and Siljamäki instead decided to take time to focus on their own music. They started signing others to their label around 2002 and, thanks to lessons learnt during McGuinness’ major label experience, managed to recoup every artist. “We gave them low advances and managed it well by being open and honest: ‘This is what we’re selling; this is what we think you’ll sell, so we’ll pay you this’. We were very generous with the deals that we did but we didn’t promise anything we couldn’t deliver,” he says. Internet-based early on, the group used digital distribution, online interaction with fans and social media to build a brand. Their online radio show, launched in 2004, and recently renamed Group Therapy, became a weekly touch point for their online community of fans and has since broadcast over 500 episodes. It can be heard on Ministry of Sound Radio every Friday evening in the UK and reaches 30 million listeners in 35 countries every week. “Over the years we’ve attempted to get it on
various radio stations around the country and we just kept getting knocked back. When it happens, you don’t really care anymore. We realised fairly soon that all the normal things that would really upset an artist’s career, like a record not getting signed to a major, we can live through,” says McGuinness. “To be in a thing that’s sustainable by its own merit and works is so fantastic.” It hasn’t all been smooth sailing though. The
group lost six figure sums on launching a poorly managed online retail operation and on lost stock when their physical distribution partner went down. But they’ve always pulled through. Says Grant: “We’ve grown up through some of the fastest changing and toughest times in the music industry but we’ve always been able to adapt. Even now I think download sales are going to fall off a cliff fairly soon, streaming won’t immediately plug the gap, eventually it will, but we’ll adapt to that as well.” Their new album, We Are All We Need, will be
released in the UK on January 19 and features the group’s trademark ‘dance music for the week’ sound. Regular vocalists Zoë Johnston and Justine Suissa appear alongside Alex Vargas.
What are the secrets to your success so far? Jono Grant: In a creative industry the product has got to be believable and fairly sincere because that’s what people buy into. When people come to university, you show your friends what music you’re into, if it’s fake, who’s going to buy into you? Who’s going to want to come see you, buy your records? I was at Lollapalooza in Chicago and this kid came up to me and said, “I’m starting to DJ and I’ve got a marketing plan”. I thought, “Oh my god”. I didn’t have time to explain to him that’s not what you want to do. It’s fascinating how many people are now getting the artist side of
ABOVE
The American dream: Above & Beyond made history in October, becoming the first British DJs to headline and sell out New York’s Madison Square Garden. The gig was streamed live to fans worldwide and reached the top global trending topic on Twitter
things wrong and are going into it with a business head. As an artist you can’t do that, it’s got to be artist first, business second - here’s the idea, how do we make money from it? Not how do we make money? Here’s an idea.
Paavo Siljamäki: Nowadays I think what the music industry has moved onto is brands. That’s where the value is. What we’ve done, almost not knowingly, is we’ve got the radio show brand, the artist brand, the label brand and we’re signing other artists as well. Our business has value and clearly states what we can do.
You’ve managed to achieve big things outside of a major label environment, what did you learn during your time at Warner, Tony, that made you consider doing things a different way? Tony McGuinness: This is the great myth about major record companies, if you could buy chart value, a Radio 1 playlist, Capitol playlist, MTV playlist and a couple of terrestrial TV spots as advertising, it would cost, when I did this sum about seven years ago, around £6m. The marketing of records is being done by, and has been done by, airplay for years. It’s only because of the ego of marketing people like me winning awards for doing marketing campaigns that people pretend spending an additional £150K on posters makes any difference. It doesn’t work. Airplay sells pop music, alongside how you market the band into people’s lives without Radio 1 airplay – there are lots of pretty successful bands that have done that over the years; Led Zeppelin never put a single out, Brian May did nothing on the radio. When the major labels could afford to sign a hundred acts and have
“The marketing of records is being done by, and has been done by, airplay for years. People [in major labels] pretend that spending £150K on marketing makes a difference but it doesn’t work. Airplay sells pop music” TONY MCGUINNESS, ABOVE & BEYOND
one of them go through the door at Radio 1 and sell a million albums and pay for the rest of the disasters, they all became very happy with that way of doing business. But there is something outside of that. When I first stared working with R.E.M., I
realised the power of a really loyal fanbase. We used the fanbase to trick Radio 1 into playing six singles from Automatic For The People, which was one of the most miserable albums ever put out, without one single pop record on it. We did it by getting the fanbase to buy every single by putting exclusive b-sides on each one. Instead of just buying the first one before the album came out, they bought all six. They all went on the radio, they all went in the charts and they sold two million albums. That’s twisting the system, R.E.M. never made a pop record, they never made a pop video but, by figuring out what was going on, that didn’t matter. The loyal fanbase was something that most people in the music business weren’t interested in. Communicating directly with your audience, rather than using a very powerful medium to connect with people who aren’t in your fanbase, is a real sea change in the way we’ve done what we’ve done. That’s enabled us to keep growing and make our
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