Last summer I attended the Atlanta stop on the Rockstar Energy Drink Uproar Festival. As many of you know, music festivals nowadays are as much about the “experience” as they are about the actual music. Whether or not this is a good thing is still debatable, in my mind anyway. That’s a blog for another time. But one cool side effect of this is the presence of merch booths for each of the participating bands.
Mostly, these are business ventures put in place to push more albums and t-shirt sales. It’s brilliant really, capitalizing on the endorphin rush one usually experiences after a live show. Fans are pumped up from the loud music and energetic crowd, making them more likely to make a split-second purchase decision, rather than traveling home and remembering to buy it later. In my case though, it fulfills an insatiable curiosity about all things rock related, especially when it comes to new bands. And now we’ve arrived at the point to my story.
If you’re in a band, here’s one piece of advice (of a million I have, for sure): remember it’s not just about you. It’s not enough to have the looks or be the most brilliant musician to ever grace our good planet. We (the fans) have to like you. And that includes the people you surround yourself with. Case in point, the merch booths. I wandered around a pretty empty vendor row since I was lucky enough to have early access to the venue. I stopped at every booth to check out their offerings. I know from experience to take the time. You never know what unew act you’ll be seeing today that’s tomorrow’s megastar. So I like to check them out while their merch is still reasonably priced.
Of about a dozen or so booths, no one said a single word to me. No one that is, until I stopped at the tent for the band New Medicine. The young guy there immediately engaged me in a friendly conversation, asking where I was from and who I was excited to see. He offered me a free koozie for the soda I was drinking if I signed up for the band’s eNewsletter. I didn’t know much about New Medicine and so I asked my normal barrage of questions, to which the guy was all too happy to answer. Where are they from? What label are they with? When did their CD come out? In case you’re interested: Minneapolis, Photo Finish Records, and September 28th respectively.
Get to the point, you say? My point is that I didn’t know New Medicine from a bum on the street before this show. But I’m demographically within their target audience with my fair share of disposable income, which I was happy to spend on New Medicine over the other bands based solely on a conversation with the cool dude in their booth. It seems a no-brainer to me, a simple practice of good customer service. Play nice and we’ll buy stuff.
So now I sit here with a cold beverage resting in a slightly worn New Medicine koozie as I write about the band and their cool merch guy on my rock blog. Is this enough to make them platinum selling artists overnight. Of course not. But when you’re a new band, every little bit of exposure helps.
And did I buy their CD, you ask? Yes, though I didn’t buy it from the merch booth. I swear, I planned on going back over to him later in the day. But the guys from the band actually came out into the crowd after their set. Holding a homemade cardboard sign written in black sharpie, they each took a stack of their new CD’s and sold them for $10 each. They were the only band to do so all day long. These guys seemed to truly love the opportunity to talk with fans, posing for pictures and signing autographs the whole time. And as the next band took the stage, the boys from New Medicine were still fielding a long line of people willing to hand over their hard earned money.
So kudos to New Medicine and all the other bands out there that know how to treat their fans and aren’t afraid to bust their butts to spread the music they love to make!
Afternote: I recently made the Lexington, Kentucky stop on the Nightmare After Christmas Tour, featuring Hollywood Undead, Stone Sour and Avenged Sevenfold. The guys from New Medicine were opening and they once again displayed the same tenacity I witnessed last year in Atlanta (both onstage and off.) After the show, the band was spotted throughout the crowd connecting with fans. They even split up at the end of the night to man all the exits and give fans one last chance to buy a CD. Read more about it here.
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