From just north of the US border in Toronto, FrankOH is a man following his dream and inspiring others along the way. He inspired me at least!
His new single comes out TODAY, and I had the chance to ask him a few questions about music, life, and the new track.
Tony Coke: Where are you from and how long have you been making music?
FrankOH: I was born in Mississauga but moved into the city and spent most of my life living in Toronto. People call it the 6ix now. I started making music in high school with various bands, then took a break to focus on school. After graduating from the University of Toronto, I wanted to return to my passion for music. I missed it. I have always been writing, but started to take things a little more seriously this past year. Another reason I started writing music again was because I wanted to create more of the stuff I loved listening to growing up. Some of the pop/rock bands I would regularly listen to either stopped playing shows or became inactive. Stylistically, most of the songs I write are inspired by what I would imagine other bands would sound like on an upcoming album. For example, recreating the “raw energy” found in the song ‘Sugar, We’re Going Down’ by Fall Out Boy was the starting point that I had with my producer Andrew Conroy in the creation process for ‘I’m Not Sayin’.
Tony Coke: So it’s a big day for you, right? Something’s going down today?
FrankOH: I’m promoting my brand new single, “I’m Not Sayin'” — releasing a music video and giving a free download for it.
Tony Coke: Very cool, congratulations! What’s interesting about this project?
FrankOH: I’m an unsigned solo artist who’s been funding my own projects. In other words, I’m just like anyone else trying to make it. I did everything that I was suppose to do– went to school, got a 9-5 job — but I realized, what’s the point if you can’t do what you love. In school, I met a lot of people that were unhappy. In a way, this project is to inspire others that you can still do the things that mean something to you –even when you’re transitioning into an adult life. Playing music was the dream of my 14 year-old self. After finishing school, I felt empty. Going back to that dream and giving it everything I got has greatly added to my life. I’ve learned so much in the past year about myself. There’s nothing more rewarding than the feeling of investing in yourself.
Tony Coke: That’s very inspiring! You make me want to go write a song right now!! What are the current goals you have for your musical career?
FrankOH: Find a “home” for the album and tour to see the world. Would love to record a full length album with John Feldmann one day.
Tony Coke: Right, right… So what’s on the radar next for FrankOH?
FrankOH: Expect more singles and videos in the coming months.
He is an artist from the West Coast, who is an actor as well as a musician and has a lot going on aside from music. He also has quite an impressive licensing resume for his latest album…
Tony Coke: Where are you from and how long have you been making music?
Xavier Toscano: I am based out of San Jose, CA and have been performing since 2008
Tony Coke: Do you create the tracks as well as the vocals?
Xavier Toscano: I only do vocals, but I do write my own lyrics and melodies.
Tony Coke: You have chosen to give away your music for free on your website, how do you monetize your musical career?
Xavier Toscano: At this point in my career, it seems that fame is the best form of compensation. But I have also scored (lucky me) 6 publishing deals from this album, and had 5 songs featured on the latest season of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians”.
Tony Coke: You are an actor as well? Do you prefer acting or music?
Xavier Toscano: Yes, I am an actor as well. I prefer music… Hands down! 🙂
Tony Coke: What are your goals for the rest of 2015 and how can people connect with you?
Xavier Toscano: My greatest goal at the time is to go on a tour. A world tour, preferably!
For all things Xavier (pronounced X-a-veer), please check out my web site: http://www.xaviertoscano.com
My buddy Michelle over at http://www.RAWartists.org, has once again contacted me about another talented band they are showcasing, this time out of Toronto, Canada. Girl, features Guy Rubino on guitar and vocals, Jean Sebastien Roy with more guitar and vocals, Grant Brain Scott playing drums, James Atin Godden on keyboards, and Joe Gervasi handling the bottom end. Here’s a little back and forth with the front man, Guy Rubino.
Tony Coke: Do you think there are any advantages or disadvantages of being from a major market such as Toronto?
Guy Rubino: The advantage of being in a band in a large city like Toronto are the obvious ones, more venues to play, influential radio stations, home to many record labels and of course a larger audience to play for. But the disadvantage is there are many more bands to compete with and therefore getting noticed in the crowd is much harder.
The internet allows us to enter the market easily but without either hiring someone to do your social media or assistance from a strategic partner (like a record label or promoter), you’re left out there alone so to speak. In this day and age, you literally have to look at a band as a entire company, you need marketing, advertising, and financial strategies over and above content. The internet hasn’t in my option knocked down the borders when your starting out, I think once you have gained popularity in one city its much easier to scale your product and the internet then becomes way more effective in knocking down those borders but only after the fact.
Tony Coke: Girl has been getting some spins on 102.1 The Edge in Toronto, have you seen a rising in web traffic because of that, and have you converted any of that traffic to fans?
Guy Rubino: Yes once we had made the Top 20 in 102.1 ‘s Next Big Thing Contest we did see quite a bit of traffic from radio play. We as a band in general, capitalized on the success of making the Top 20 through social media. Getting that acclaim from 102.1 really helped to legitimize our efforts to date. It also opened the doors introducing us to new promoters in the city, who then in turn booked gigs for us to play in venues we had never played before.
The opportunity to enter the contest was a natural process, as in reality, their are only a few stations our music is geared too and 102.1fm is definitely one of them. I was literally driving in my car heard about the contest and entered as soon as I got home.
Tony Coke: Your have a show coming up Sep. 11th at the Mod Club, with the RAW: natural born artists organization. Have you played one of those events before? How did that come about?
Guy Rubino: Yes, we did a RAW Event back in May and it was a glowing success for all parties concerned. Michelle Bylow was coordinating that event and she was familiar with Girl’s music and thought it was a good fit. Clearly she was right as the response we received from the audience was overwhelming. The whole evening in general for all artists was a hit and we are delighted to do it all over again…
Tony Coke: The image you use on several of your social media sites, is an old photograph of a young girl. Is that girl someone special?
Guy Rubino: The name Girl originated by paying homage to all the women in our lives that have touched us in a positive way. This could be a mom, sister, girlfriend, wife, 1st grade teacher, famous musician, etc. We wanted to capture this women in her formative years on her way to greatness, hence the younger photo we used. The idea is with every release we send out there will be a different photo featured of a different girl. In this particular case we used Jean Sebastien Roy’s (one of the founding band member’s) mother.
Tony Coke: What is on the horizon for you guys after the RAW show? What are your goals for 2016, and how can people connect with you? Guy Rubino: Our plan is to continue to build our audience which keeps growing at a steady rate. In order to do this we will to continue to play shows as often we can while reaching out through social media channels. We also will begin to look for strategic partners via promoters, and or a record label to help this process grow quickly. As I mentioned earlier, this is a business like anything else, and to expand, we need to either invest internally or work with equally savvy partners to ensure success. Knowing our work ethic, we will likely do both.
We plan to release our first video shortly, as well as a very socially interactive web site. The plan for 2016 is to record new music so that we can not only build our audience but keep the ones we have now. Currently we can be found on Twitter, Bandcamp, Facebook & Soundcloud until our website is up and running.
http://bandsrising.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/1.jpg427640TonyCokeTonyCoke2015-08-26 15:39:262015-08-26 15:56:27Girl Toronto
World Wide Groove Corp is an electronic duo from Nashville with an impressive and lengthy catalog of music. They are committed to their craft, hardworking, and thankfully, shared a ton of great information!
I started by asking about their latest maxi-single, “Make Me Free”. If you aren’t familiar with a maxi-single, it is somewhere between an EP and a single track release. In their case, it is 5 versions of one song. Hit play on the soundcloud player below and have a listen to all 5 versions as you read through.
Take notes, there’s a lot to learn in this one!
[ico type=”icon-comments-alt”] Tony Coke: The maxi-single – I think this is a wonderful thing. I’ve done this in the past with songs and offered them as added value content for free to our fans. Are you distributing all of the mixes individually through CD Baby, Tunecore, or whoever you use? That would be a pretty big investment. What is the monetization strategy with the maxi single?
[ico type=”icon-comments”] Ellen – WGC: We distribute through CD Baby to all of the major digital music outlets like iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc. I prefer CD Baby since there are no annual fees and you only pay when you’re selling music. I crunched the numbers and with TuneCore you need to be selling something like 1,500 downloads a month to come out ahead. I don’t want to feel like in 10 years I have to take my albums down because I’m paying to keep them up there. But to answer your question… YES… it IS a big investment, and all of this Year of the Groove has been an enormous EXPENSE for us. We had to take on extra music production work for our clients in order to be able to afford this, so we’ve worked our butts off this year.
The general monetization strategy for not only the “Make Me Free” maxi-single but all of our artist releases is to try to license them to film, TV, or advertising. Because realistically, artists do NOT make any significant money from direct to consumer sales, now that people no longer purchase CDs and downloading is giving way to streaming. I’ve done blog posts about how much my royalty statements are from the streaming plays of our music. It wasn’t long ago that a statement from BMI showed one line item where over 47,000 plays of a song paid only $2.44. I mean… that’s pretty sad.
So… the only real money to be made any more is from licensing, but that’s a total shot in the dark. We’re trying to build relationships with music supervisors. This type of pursuit definitely dictates the types of songs we will be investing ourselves in in the future. If anyone wonders why there are so many pop songs out there with choruses that have all these non-lyrical vocal hooks and simple repetitive universal lyrics, it’s because these are the types of songs that get licensed.
One other possibility is to get some vinyl pressed at some point. We might do a Kickstarter [which we’ve never done], just as an “advanced sale of vinyl” opportunity. If not enough people care enough to get our music on vinyl, then we don’t get it pressed and I’m not stuck with a garage full of product I’ve got to figure out how to sell. I’m not sure when/if we’ll do this, my head is still spinning from the past year.
These are really hard times for songwriters and artists to make a living from their music. Going on the road costs money, recording and producing and distribution music costs money, promoting music costs money… we absolutely would not be doing this if we didn’t love music and need to do music because of the kind of people we are. Also, it helps that we have paying music clients so we can make a living using this skill set.
I am very intentionally nurturing my child to follow his instincts in mechanical engineering so he can support us when we’re old. HA!
[ico type=”icon-comments-alt”] Tony Coke: Exactly how many albums and singles are available for purchase? What is your business end check list for each track you release? Copyright, register with your PRO, soundexchange, ect…
[ico type=”icon-comments”] Ellen – WGC: Our Year of the Groove series, where we put out one new music release a month for a year, just ended and that filled out our discography list quite a bit. Here is the complete list of our releases starting in 2007…
Chillodesiac Lounge, vol. 1: FEVER
Besame Mucho Remixed
Butterflies Remixed
Love Is The New Rich – SINGLE
When I Fall In Love – SINGLE
Freak the Beat – SINGLE
Summertime – SINGLE
Come to Me – SINGLE
Kiss Me Slow – SINGLE
The Legend of the Fall – SINGLE
Supermodel Astronaut – EP
Flow – EP
When the Holiday Brings You Home – SINGLE
Glitter & Bliss – SINGLE
Standard Chill
It’s You I Love – SINGLE
Until I Have You – SINGLE
Human – SINGLE
Make Me Free – MaxiSingle
My back end check list includes the following:
Create artwork for release
Register song with BMI
Register with SoundExchange
Set up release through CD Baby
Put release on BandCamp
Add music to website, SoundCloud, ReverbNation, Last.fm, and any other social profiles I remember to update every few months
Write press release and distribute through various outlets
Write blog posts telling the story behind the song
Promote all relevant links through all social media profiles
Try to track down sites to review our music
Track down internet radio to submit music for airplay
Since we were doing one release a month, I couldn’t do all of the follow up stuff on every release on top of everything else. I had to stop reaching out to DJs and submitting music for airplay within the first few months because that can be an endless time suck, and some of the social profiles only got updated every few months. Also I registered several things with BMI and SoundExchange all at once. Setting up each release with BandCamp, CD Baby, SoundCloud, ReverbNation and on our website, and writing the press release and blog entry, and promoting like crazy through social media… those were what I managed to do with each release every month. There’s only so much of me to go around.
[ico type=”icon-comments-alt”] Tony Coke: One song a month for a year is quite a feat considering everything that goes into completing 1 quality song. How do you start to organize a project like that?
[ico type=”icon-comments”] Ellen – WGC: Good question. It was a definite learning experience, that is for sure. The whole motivation to begin the Year of the Groove was because we had this back log of songs we’d been working on over the years, and we just couldn’t seem to FINISH a full album. Due to the nature of what we do, so many of the songs were “one offs” that didn’t feel cohesive enough to go on an album with the others. At one point we thought we were working on two different albums at once, and finally we decided to just put out singles. I knew that with Kurt’s busy schedule, there needed to be some hard deadlines or these songs were NEVER GOING TO BE FINISHED. So, for better or worse, we just went for it and sent out the press release, publicly declaring what we were going to do, and kept ourselves accountable. I had a release schedule at the beginning, but that kept changing when we would realize that a song wouldn’t be done in time and so we needed to take the shortest path to completion on whichever song could be ready the soonest. Things had to stay flexible. If I wasn’t such a raging overachiever coming off of a forced season of creative hiatus, fueled by my intense frustration over not getting any new music out there, it likely never would have happened. I couldn’t do this for another year on top of the rest of my life. Kurt and I both have actual jobs [he’s the creative director for iv Music Group and I am an adjunct instructor at Belmont University School of Music], plus we have our own music clients we do work for, plus I home school my child so… yeah, I’m ready for a break.
[ico type=”icon-comments-alt”] Tony Coke: Do you feel being based in Nashville is advantage to WGC, even though it’s a predominantly country scene? Would you recommend other artists relocate to Nashville, or LA, or somewhere with a big music scene, or has the internet taken location out of the equation?
[ico type=”icon-comments”] Ellen – WGC: I can argue this both ways. I definitely feel like geography plays a big part of building a career in music. It’s all about relationships and reputation. So many of my relationships started by going to college here in Nashville, and my college friends went out into the industry and now we know each other. You cannot put a price on that. Kurt moved here after we both graduated from University of Miami for graduate school, so he became connected with the people I knew here in town from my undergraduate years, and it branched out from there. You see people when you go to the post office, go get groceries, go to church, go to the park, go out to eat… there’s no substitute for physically being where the industry is.
THEN AGAIN… that was all in reference to the work we do that pays our bills, not necessarily our electronic music we put out as artists. We hardly have any action here in Nashville for our WGC releases, that’s mostly over in Europe and Asia, or for licensing pitches out in L.A. So… on that front, the internet is our “home base”.
The bottom line is, regardless of where you live, nothing is just going to come to those who wait. You have to go after things. The majority of the compilations we’ve been on and radio airplay we’ve gotten has been a direct result of us reaching out and getting our music in front of people’s faces. Whether it’s in town or in Thailand.
[ico type=”icon-comments-alt”] Tony Coke: The video for “Supermodel Astronaut” is great for a number of reasons. It empowers women, it includes fans, it has an interactive quality about it, and it’s also a great track. How did you go about creating the video and planning the release? Did you release the song, then reach out to fans asking for video clips? Or did you film the people, and have the video ready to go on release date?
[ico type=”icon-comments”] Ellen – WGC: Thanks so much! I was actually very happy with how that whole campaign went, especially considering it was just one of our monthly Year of the Groove releases. The video was a definite after thought, but fortunately, I thought of it before we released the song, so we could put them both out at the same time. Obviously the song needed to be close to done so the ladies could lip sync to it for their own videos, but it was all a big effort. I just started contacting people through Facebook asking them to participate, and then they got their friends involved, and by the end I was emailing with women as far away as Greece and Pakistan to get their video clips. It was amazing.
I was especially thrilled when someone wrote an article about it and posted it on Huffington Post. Without the video, the song never would have gone that far. It just goes to show that if you have a strong concept and a lot of follow through, you can do big things. I heard from so many women who were thrilled to help spread that message.
I would have gone much further with the campaign, but since it was during the Year of the Groove, I was still promoting the previous release during the whole Supermodel Astronaut Challenge, and also having to prepare our next release in the mean time, and this was while I was in the middle of a semester at Belmont and doing home school with my child. I worked straight through 6 consecutive weekends that Fall, it was not healthy. All that to say, I had a lot more ideas of how to carry the Supermodel Astronaut brand further, but I was spread way too thin to make it happen.
[ico type=”icon-comments-alt”] Tony Coke: What’s the #1 most effective marketing tool, event, promotion, or idea you have utilized thus far to promote your music business?
[ico type=”icon-comments”] Ellen – WGC: Well, I think what I was just saying about the Supermodel Astronaut Challenge would rank at the top, probably. For all of the reasons you mentioned. I took a song I wrote, I created a social media campaign to go with it, anchored around a call to action video, and I built in a “share and tag” function in the challenge. Worldwide Groove Corporation would never have landed on Huffington Post if all we did was release music and a regular music video. It always helps to attach your songs to something much larger than yourself. In the Supermodel Astronaut scenario, I attached it to the unrealistic beauty standards in the media and the negative effect that has on our culture. By connecting with a concept that is so profound in our society, people responded.
Another example was in our release the month before that one [I’d never have put these two songs out consecutively had I known what would develop], which was “The Legend of the Fall”, a metaphorical song about the corruption in the food industry in America. We were contacted by the Oregon Right to Know organization to partner with them in promoting their ballot initiative for labeling of genetically modified foods, which I’m extremely passionate about. So we made Worldwide Groove Corporation branded content to share through social media for Oregon Right to Know, and then we also contacted Right to Know Colorado since they also had a ballot initiative and parlayed the Oregon activity to their state as well. I would have worked that more, but I was trying to make the Supermodel Astronaut video happen. Now that I’m writing about this, I can’t believe we did as much as we did. Whew!
[ico type=”icon-comments-alt”] Tony Coke: Absolutely! Congratulations on all of those accomplishments and thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and strategies with us!
You can connect with Worldwide Groove Corp at the links listed below. You better get started now, by the time you consume all their current material, they may have 10 or 20 new albums.
