Audible Treats: Buzz-Builders, Press Agents, Music Marketing Strategists

CARROLL GARDENS, BROOKLYN: The Internet has unquestionably bred new opportunities in many aspects of an artist’s career, and marketing and publicity are certainly no exceptions. However, with so many media platforms and resources available, an artist may not know how best to use them to his or her advantage, or even gain access to them. This is exactly what Brooklyn-based company Audible Treats has set out to tackle.

Audible Treats founders Gavin Rhodes and Michelle McDevitt met in NYU Music Business school. (They're also married!) Photo credit: Alexander Richter (www.alexanderrichterphoto.com)

Audible Treats founders Michelle McDevitt and Gavin Rhodes met in NYU’s Steinhardt Music Business graduate program and formed the company in 2004, providing customized marketing and publicity campaigns to help clients meet their specific goals.

While not a full-fledged management firm, Audible Treats effectively focuses on an important part of furthering an artist’s career, whether as a long-term partner, or short-term service.

Michelle and Gavin have thus far worked with the likes of T-Pain, Nelly, Del the Funky Homosapien, and K’naan, and are currently working with acts such as Slightly Stoopid, Deluka, David Banner & 9th Wonder, and Tanya Morgan.

SonicScoop caught up with Michelle at her office in Carroll Gardens to hear what Audible Treats was all about.

Nice to meet you! So, we see records by David Banner & 9th Wonder, Slightly Stoopid, Black Sheep, Ed Lover, Metermaids and Erk The Jerk among your current projects. Can you briefly explain how Audible Treats services a project?

We provide two main services, which are print-publicity and online digital marketing. In print-publicity you’re getting reviews and features in different magazines, and on the online side we do reviews, features, getting tracks on certain sites and blogs, setting up contests for third parties, coming up with behind-the-scenes viral video ideas, and social networking strategies.

And what would you say are the criteria you have when you’re looking at working with an artist? Are there certain qualifications you look for?

We have a varied roster, and that’s something we’re always known for. We’re not just taking on indie projects and we’re not just taking on major labels like some other companies. We’re just kind of like, “If it’s great, we’ll work it.” But in terms of what is required:

1) The music has to hit us a certain way.

2) Unless it’s a major label project with others on the team, I have to know that you’re really serious and that you’re willing to put in as much work as we are. There are some artists who are really disillusioned and think, “Oh I just paid somebody to handle all my publicity, online marketing, and social networks, and I can just kick back and reap the rewards.”

Those days are over. They might’ve been okay in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but since the decline of music sales, you can’t just sit back and relax and expect anyone else to work as hard as you. So if an artist is not really willing to lift a finger, it really sucks the passion out of the project.

3) If you want to get really technical about it, we really want all of our projects to be presented in a professional manner, so they need to have professional tools. For example, you should have a really good bio. You should pay somebody to write your biography because after the music that’s the second most requested item that people ask for. You need to have professional photos as well. Branding is everything, and that’s what we incorporate into our campaigns, so we want to make sure that your photos represent who you are.

Agreed! And once an artist is ready to break through, how does Audible Treats penetrate the overly flooded Internet music market?

"Hello," the latest mixtape by Brooklyn-based Metermaids features remixes of Grizzly Bear, Spoon and Animal Collective, and the turntable mastery of NYC's own Rob Swift.

Obviously it depends from artist to artist in where you are, what your genre is, and what your target demographic is. If you’re a jazz artist, for example, and you’re targeting people 40-50 and up, maybe you don’t need to have such a big presence on the Internet. But if you’re doing anything that has to do with youth culture then you do have to, and that differs from pop, to hip hop, to electronica. All the ways that you go about marketing that kind of music are different.

But first and foremost I think it just has to do with strategy. I think there is a certain amount of online etiquette that people need to realize. Sometimes people just go on Twitter and they’re shouting. They’re not actually interacting with a lot of potential fans that they could have brought into their nucleus. People have a presence on social networks, but they’re not fully taking advantage of them. They’re not herding potential fans to the right places. They’re not forming communities. There are all these things that artists have at their fingertips, but you have to know how to go about it.

There are three main things in what makes an artist successful:

1) The product itself has to be amazing. The music needs to be at a certain level.

2) You have to have a great team. No one can do it by themselves. As much as successful people wanna let you know that they did it by themselves, they really didn’t.

3) A lot of luck and timing that is just out of your hands. That’s the one x-factor that you can’t control, and I think that a lot of people forget about that sometimes. You have to be at the right place at the right time and that’s not something you can really pursue. It’s just the way the world works. Take Justin Bieber for example, I have no doubt that the kid is talented, he’s got a lot of things going for him, but there’s no doubt that there’s like 15-20 other Justin Bieber’s on the Internet. He just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

OK and what else can an artist do strategically, assuming they’ve got #1 and #2 covered?

One thing that a lot of artists don’t do is that they don’t have a short term plan or a long term plan. That is insane. You are joking yourself and you’re joking everyone around you if you don’t have at least some kind of goals like, “This is what I want to do in 6 months,” and, “This is where I want to be a year from now.”

From there, it’s working backwards. It’s like any business plan or any kind of personal development. I just feel like a lot of times artists concentrate too much on their music and not enough on the business aspect, which in the beginning, I don’t think you can afford to not do. You have to do both. There comes a time where hopefully your music should be your biggest responsibility and you could leave the business to someone else that you trust (though you should always be involved in your business to an extent), but I think in the beginning you really have to pay attention to what’s going on, where you fit in.

It’s like any other business. You have to know who your competition is. Who you admire. Who the people are who have proven to be successful the way that you want ahead of you. Studying the greats.

I think people get hung up on who makes “the best music.” Well if you look at the Billboard charts, it’s not about “the best music,” it’s about who is able to be marketed, who has the best manager, who do they know, etc. It’s about everything else. It’s about the artist being able to handle the business aspect of it. There has been a lot of personal sacrifice, such as having to give up a lot of your personal life. The most commercially successful don’t complain about doing interviews. They had to do it. It’s not just about the singing. It’s about all the other stuff too and though the music ends up being an important part of the pie, it’s just a slice. It’s not the whole pie.

And what are some other major challenges you face in your line of work in helping artists gain exposure?

Tanya Morgan in Brooklyn. Photo by Robert Adam Mayer.

To a certain degree, it’s keeping up with the new next social media platform. When something new comes out, we think, “Should we jump on this early? Should we wait until other people start using this platform too?”

Another big challenge is staying current with the flood of information that is out there — knowing what projects we want to work with, pop culture topics, something that’s gone viral, industry news, etc. You have to keep on top of that. Also, sometimes working with a client who is hard to reach, and you’re not given enough tools and enough direction, and yet they still expect results.

Gotcha. Is there a specific recent project you can name that you spearheaded for an artist that went especially well?

There’s one group who we’ve been working with for a long time who were not known when they first came out. It’s a rap group of three guys named Tanya Morgan. They’ve been around for a few years now, and were one of my first clients. We’ve had a great working relationship, and they put out really good music. I think the one thing that hasn’t happened for them is being at the right place at the right time, but they’ve gone on to do some really great stuff.

They got amazing critical acclaim for their albums, recognized by the biggest music magazines and the most important publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Spin, and Brooklyn Vegan. They’ve had a lot of really great support, and they’ve been able to do a lot of stuff on their own based what we’ve provided for them. They went on tour with Hieroglyphics crew, and they’ve been recognized by the industry as being one of the best indie hip-hop groups in a long time. We’re really proud of that.

What do you take away from that experience?

I guess it’s positive reinforcement that the closer knit your team is the more you can get out of each other. I think when expectations are not met, or something goes awry, and when finger-pointing starts, that’s really destructive. It’s about letting each other know what’s on your agenda, what you’re doing, and what they could do to help you. Having the right team in place, including manager, record label, etc. is crucial.

What industry trends do you see and how is Audible Treats adapting to them?

I think there’s obviously been a shakedown in the magazine industry that’s similar to what happened in the housing industry. It just got to be too much. There were like 25 magazines dedicated to hip-hop, 30 magazines dedicated to electronic music, and so on. Everyone was covering the same subjects to a certain degree, and it just reached a peak. So from there, when the ad dollars pull out, you’re just going to be left with the strongest surviving.

Ed Lover of "The Ed Lover Show" on NYC's 105.1

Another trend that’s really huge right now is direct-to-fan marketing, which has a direct correlation to print media and even online blogs to a certain degree, where the artist is not even going through the press to get to fans. They’re going direct-to-fan. However, I still think there will always be media giving their stance and cosign to things that people will pay attention to.

I think to a certain degree there’s going to be a shakedown of blogs and websites, and at some point people are going to get tired of doing it all for free, and they’re gonna back out. There are only going to be a few that are really looked at as what used to be the magazines of the day — the ones you need to get into in order to make a difference. And those players have already kind of risen to the top a little bit. The game’s not over by any means and there will always be new players, but everyone’s always like, “I need to get into Pitchfork.” It’s like they’ve already proven themselves to be pinnacles. So it’s us knowing who those important players are and making sure that we’re on their radar and they’re on our radar.

What are the advantages of being an New York City-based company?

We’re able to meet up with writers and industry folks here and there. You see industry people all the time whether it’s at parties or other meetings. You end up being friends with a lot of industry people because you see them all the time. This is the pinnacle, you know, like “If you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere.”

To a certain degree all the arts want to come here and be successful. It’s really competitive here, like the Internet. Everything’s here and it’s really hard to distinguish yourself, so often times I think it’s much easier for artists to make it in their own town and then as they grow come to NYC. But artists even from out of town are always coming here to do press stuff, and it’s easy to knock out a bunch of stuff for them.

Ultimately, we’re in a service-based industry, so we could just pick up and move wherever we want, and we’ve considered that. But it just hasn’t been the right time and there are a lot of advantages to being here.

And what does the future hold for Audible Treats?

The future of the industry is really crazy, so we’re never shutting ourselves down to anything that might be a growth opportunity for us. We’re doing this right now, but if something else comes along that seems to be a good fit for us, we’ll pursue that as well, so we kind of always have our eyes open to things.

One of our goals in the first five years was to have an official employee, which we’re very lucky to have. I think in the future it’s to have more employees and to expand genres, which we’re already doing. We used to be pretty urban focused, but we’re opening up to other styles as well, specifically rock and electronic music. We’re also offering a lot more social media and marketing consulting types of services. In a nutshell, it’s to keep growing.

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