Progress is where Eleven Seven is headed with its recent expansion into the Eleven Seven Music Group, which already has Eleven Seven Records under its umbrella and just announced the launch of the Alternative-leaning Five Seven Records. Eleven Seven Music Group SVP of Marketing and Promotion Steve Kline is the longest running employee under Allen Kovac’s expanding empire, which also includes management company 10th Street Entertainment where Kline pulls double duty as SVP of Marketing and Promotion. With a history that includes stints different major labels, we caught up with Kline for his take on working at an indie label and how he approaches radio in the world of ever-tightening playlists and airwave access.
by Michael Parrish
Ask Steve Kline what he focuses on during the course of a day and he answers, “Big picture stuff. Big picture marketing initiatives, big picture radio.” As Kline also says, he’s “in the trenches for a small company” and is working hard to keep his company’s progress moving forward in today’s evolving music industry business model.
Progress is where Eleven Seven is headed with its recent expansion into the Eleven Seven Music Group which already has FMQB’s 2008 Rock Label of the Year, Eleven Seven Records, under its umbrella and just announced the launch of the Alternative-leaning Five Seven Records.
In his role as Eleven Seven Music Group SVP of Marketing and Promotion, Kline oversees all radio efforts and also weighs in on marketing initiatives. He is the longest running employee under Allen Kovac’s expanding empire, which also includes management company 10th Street Entertainment where Kline pulls double duty as SVP of Marketing and Promotion, again overseeing all radio efforts, weighing in on marketing initiatives and acting as a liaison to the labels that 10th Street’s artists are signed to.
With a history that includes stints at J Records, Columbia Records/Sony Music, Lava/Atlantic Records, and MCA, we caught up with Kline for his take on working at an indie label and how he approaches radio in the world of ever-tightening playlists and airwave access.
What is Eleven Seven’s core philosophy for launching an artist to radio?
The way we work here, it’s not up to radio to break our artists. We just don’t work that way. We try to build a story online and on the road before taking an artist to radio. Radio is beautiful because we get the frequency of impressions when a song goes into rotation. But we also love working with radio on a marketing level and a touring level because we can get on-air impressions on a promotional level. If our artist is in a particular market, we always like to work with the local stations. On a national level, we can do promotions for our tours online with companies like Clear Channel or AOL. When we do all these things, we want to get the impressions to converge at the right point in time upon an album release or when we drop a single.
You have worked at a few different major labels, but now find yourself working at an indie. What are some of the differences at Eleven Seven versus the majors you’ve worked at?
There are obviously pluses and minuses on both sides of the fence, but when I made the conscious decision to come here five-and-a-half years ago, I was really intrigued by the fact that there was so much set-up involved. When I was at a major label, if there was a huge, huge priority and the marketing initiative began 90-days out, it was a long time. Working at a major with 50 to 100 releases or more in a year, was really about air traffic control and that’s the opposite of what we do here. We have a healthy workload and release schedule relative to a company of our size, but it’s nothing close to what the majors put out on a regular basis.
Like I said, we really try to build a story before we go to radio and not throw a song up against the wall at radio to see if it sticks and then spend money behind it. We want to develop underneath it, and hopefully reach radio’s listeners before we even ask them to play it, so when they ultimately play it, the song has a better chance of reacting. So that’s something that we do differently.
Granted, the major labels do get their rush releases, but anyone at a major label would tell you the same thing about wanting to have a story in place before going to radio. To me, it comes down to what you said about air traffic control and that your label afforded the opportunity to take a longer time to develop your artists.
Yes; exactly. We tend to stick it out longer with singles. If you look at our track record, we are relentless. Sixx:A.M., which came out a few years back, had a handful of believers in the beginning and a whole lot of non-believers. But we sunk our teeth into it and week after week we converted a few more people, and it took us six months to get it into the Top 5 and Active and Mainstream Rock, and it ultimately never went away. It peaked at No. 2 at Active, No. 1 at Mainstream Rock, and it is one of the most played songs in those formats for the past few years. That’s a great example.
With Trapt, we spent six months on “Who’s Going Home With You Tonight” and got that up to No. 11. Drowning Pool is another really good example. This is the third track from the third album of a band with its third lead singer. The first two songs on this album went to No. 15, and this song right now is sitting at No. 4 at Active Rock. We’re about to go Top 15 at Mainstream Rock, and we’re crossing it to Alternative. This is a two-year album cycle right now, but we really wanted to develop this band and make sure they were accepted and acknowledged for being a real band in spite of the fact that they’re on their third lead singer. But that’s what we do and we did that as well as anybody else. I just don’t feel the majors are equipped to really stick it out the way we can. On the other hand, they’ve got more people on their teams, so their armies are a lot bigger than ours, so I do have a little bit of envy with regard to that.
But on the other hand, you have an owner in Allen Kovac that is involved with the making of every single record you guys do. How nice it is to be able to actually go to the person who owns the place?
When I first got here, I missed having my nice windowed office all to myself with my assistant answering the phones. Now, we have three offices. London, an office in L.A. with half of our staff, and then the New York office is really just a big loft. Allen spends most of his time here. I sit right next to him and I learn every single day from him. I can get answers immediately and we bounce ideas off each other all the time. The business is changing and it’s changing at such a rapid pace that we’re trying to figure out new ways to not just keep up, but also to try to be ahead of the curve and anticipate.
There’s no ivory tower here. Allen is a guy who has relationships at radio. If he can help, he’ll roll-up-his-sleeves and help. He’ll hop on a plane and go see anybody. He’ll go to Atlanta; he’ll go to Harrisburg — it doesn’t matter. He’s the same way when it comes to touring, publicity and all other areas of the business. He travels around the world setting up international deals. He’s a hands-on guy from the recording process to the marketing process. It’s great to get to work so closely with him and he is why our model is different from the majors. Allen is involved in the production of every record and works very closely with every single one of our bands. We can make money depending upon the relationship, because we don’t spend a lot of money producing records. We don’t spend a lot of time in the studio. We don’t spend money on big name producers and since our marketing and production budgets are so low, we don’t have to sell that many records to break even and ultimately make a profit. If you listen to our records from top to bottom, they’re all really, really good. There are five or six radio tracks on every single one of our records and we have to make some tough decisions deciding which tracks we’re going to go with. I really believe that.
Talk about the launch of Five Seven Records and its impact.
We value all of our media partners, whether they’re in print, television, new media, and we certainly want to be able to better super-serve our radio partners. We’ve been able to brand Eleven Seven Records on the Rock side to when people see something come across their desks from us; they’re expecting straight-up Rock artists and straight-up Rock songs. It’s very similar to what Roadrunner was in its early days. They did a fantastic job. But now with the addition of Five Seven, the idea is to have a more Alternative division of the mother ship. We’re going to announce the rosters for both labels within the next couple of weeks and let people know who’s going to be on Eleven Seven, what additions there are going to be to the overall Eleven Seven Music Group and who’s going to be on Five Seven Music, as well.
Can you let out what band you will be announcing as additions to the roster?
Let’s just say we’ll make the announcement in the next couple of weeks and there will be at least one band that everybody’s familiar with.
You brought in Jackie Kajzer to oversee the radio promotion for you at Five Seven.
Jackie is just incredible. She was at The Firm for eight years and almost single-handedly broke Five Finger Death Punch. She’s somebody who is completely passionate about music and we’re lucky enough to have her here. We’re going to be able to cover more ground. It’ll be better for our artists; it’ll be better for radio.
You mentioned touring as a big component of your artist’s success. How important is radio’s involvement in helping make a stop in a market much more memorable?
Radio is really significant. A big part of my job on the manager’s side is to be involved in the marketing of our tours. And radio, in particular, is one of the most efficient ways to sell tickets. What we want to do is align ourselves with a radio station that wants to brand alongside us. We work very closely to get impressions on-air, online, and utilize radio’s resources, while we give them valuable content and hopefully unique access to our bands. So radio is really, really key.
If you look at radio, you get local on-air impressions. You get on-line impressions that drive people to listen on-air. And then most of the radio stations now have an e-blast database and it’s all demographically targeted. So you get impressions there that drive people to the online and on-air entities. And now a lot of stations are developing cell-phone databases where they text people messages. So, there’s one-stop shopping at radio for vertical integration in a local market for a targeted demographic, which is beautiful and why radio’s really key. We definitely like to give radio as much access as possible to our artists, and try to be creative and compelling and cut through the clutter.
You mentioned the management side of your job, which is a whole other role you have in your relationship with Allen. Talk a little bit about what you do for Tenth Street Entertainment, and how you do keep the jobs separate.
On the management side we work with artists that are not signed to the label, but we manage. Papa Roach is a good example of that. We’re lucky enough to have Interscope as our label partner, so I coordinate with the promotion department on anything that involves the band on a radio level. I’m actually the longest running employee here at Tenth Street after Allen. These days we’re all wearing a lot of hats. Look at radio. Programmers are not just programming off-air, a lot of these guys are on-air. A lot of these guys are overseeing more than one station. We all have to wear multiple hats. These days it’s better to be busy than to be bored. And since the business is evolving, it makes more sense to be involved in a lot of different areas.
Do you feel that you can you step out of your role as a record guy and put yourself in the shoes of a radio programmer and fully comprehend what they’re going through today?
In some ways I can. With regard to consolidation, I can certainly empathize with them because; over the course of time I was involved with a lot of mergers. What’s been happening in radio in a similar sort of way was happening to the record labels a few years earlier. There are definitely some correlations, but as far as deciding what exactly goes on-air in running a radio station, I’ve never done that outside of college radio. I’ve worked multiple formats from a promotion side. I really try to sympathize with what’s going on. I try to learn. I try to ask a lot of questions to program directors. I want to know what their goals are, because it doesn’t matter what mine are if it’s not going to serve them in anyway. No matter how great I think the song is, or how well the song is doing in other markets, it has to overlap with what’s important to them, with what’s going to get them ratings, and with what’s important to their listeners.
I really try to pull people in, and not push them on music. Again, I try to understand what their goals are and we want to be the label that helps radio achieve those goals, get ratings and help differentiate them from the competition. We’ll make unique content for their websites. We’ll come up with compelling on-air promotions and we will continue to deliver great music that will cut through the clutter.
We’ve done a good job so far, but we’re work-in-progress too. We’re a very young label, but our relationships are getting better, and the fact that we’re expanding is going to make that process evolve to an even greater level.
** QB Content by Michael Parrish **
