Welcome to Episode 55 of the Bandhive podcast.

It is time we are back with another episode about how you can grow your band into a successful and sustainable career. My name is James Cross, and I'm here with Matt Hoos of Alive in Barcelona, recording the week of Thanksgiving.

How are you today, Matt? I'm doing pretty wonderful, James. I woke up to a winter wonderland in my backyard, and, uh, you know, it's really starting to put me into the holiday spirit. So I'm excited. How are things over there on your side? That sounds wonderful. Things were good here. We also have snow coming down. I went for a walk this morning with my dog short walk. He's 16. 5, so he doesn't go too far anymore. We go up the driveway because we've got a pretty long driveway, and it was so nice to be out there in the snow, and he was enjoying it, too.

He's always loved the snow when he was little. He would like in the deep snow jump around and he looked like a dolphin jumping out of the water because he's got short, stubby legs, and right now it's just a dusting. But you could tell he was happy to see Snow again. That's good. I feel you, man. I'm glad you have some snow as well out there in Colorado. It's nice until it's like month three, and then you're like, This is enough. Please go away now. The snow is awesome.

It's the cold. That sucks. You know, when you look outside, you're like, man, that's pretty. And then you go outside and you're like, Oh, I want to go back inside Now that's the worst. Indeed it is. But hey, at least for right now it's not too cold. It's like in the high twenties here, and once again we're talking about the weather. But at least I threw in a story about my dog. His name's Bapu. You can find him on instagram hashtag bop with the dog hashtag not at, he doesn't have his own account.

Check out Bob. Whose action shots? Yes, yes, he's adorable. I also have stories of him on my profile at Mad Rock. Xcx. There's like a story highlight of all Bapu. So there's that as well. All you dog lovers get to Instagram. Yeah, I never made his own account because I'm so bad at posting on social media. The last thing I need is another account. Mhm. Anyway, we have what I think is gonna be a really interesting episode, especially right now during the era of co vid big shout out to Eddie Schmidt of the band Big Dopes.

And Eddie's question was how to keep a band going when all the members live far apart. And as Matt and I were talking about this, we're like, Yeah, this, you know, could apply to any band at any time if they're all remote. But it could also apply to anyone who can't rehearse or work together right now because of lockdowns. You know, different areas of the country and the world have different policies, so this might be something that's beneficial to a band, even if you all live in the same area.

but can't get together right now due to your local regulations. And really, there's one main point that we're going to touch on over and over again in this episode, which is communication. Communication is super important, and we actually have a past episode about that. It's Episode 26. How to stop losing opportunities and start communicating with teeth so you can look that up in your favorite podcast app at better dot band slash Listen and find your favorite podcast app. Then look for that episode, which again is number 26. That all aside, we're going to talk about a couple other things in this episode as well that helped tie into inter band communication and working remotely.

Do you want to take it away, Matt? Yeah, sure, I'll jump right in. Many of our long time listeners know that I live in a different state than all of my band members, and before I lived in a different state, my guitarist actually also lived in a different state. With this, there was all sorts of different struggles, trials, tribulations, whatever you wanna call it, Hurdles to jump over. We kind of learned at a younger stage the hard way that different band members will take on different roles in your business.

So, for instance, if you work at let's say you work at McDonald's, you have somebody that takes the orders on the cashier. You have somebody that bags of food, you have somebody in the back that is cooking the food, these air all very integral steps in the entire transaction. Basically, you know, and what these with these really successful businesses have done these successful large brands is they have calculated risk. And then they have basically turned a process into an assembly line. And each person on this assembly line has one step of the full process in order to get the customer or the client what they need.

This is no different in your band. You all know who the most talented musician in your band is. You know, everybody's got one that's just their way better than everybody else. Maybe it's the one guy in the band that was classically trained. Maybe it's the one guy that you know spent eight straight months in his bedroom playing guitar. We'll have one, maybe even two. Or maybe you're a whole band of virtuoso players, you know, like the red hot Chili Peppers where you just every single one of you bring something perfect to the table, writing wise Most of the time, this isn't the case most of the time, and this is a cold truth.

This is a hard to swallow pill. Most of the time you have one, maybe two people in the band. That right, all of the music. Everybody wants to write music, and everybody wants to have, you know, their songs be at the forefront and things like that. But as a business owner, you need to be able to take a step back. You need to not be so emotionally attached so that you can make the hard decisions. And you need to put whoever the best songwriter is into the role of song writing.

This is a expectation that you will have for this member. And if you know that this guy, you know, I know you've heard us all say aces in their places before. If you have somebody that's really good at writing music, you want them writing music. If you have somebody that's really good with social interactions, you want them on your social media posts If you have somebody that's got a little bit mawr, uh, tenacity, you want them to be in a little bit more of a managerial role and maybe your day to day role.

Maybe they're your liaison or your contact between all of the other businesses. Your networker. Essentially, these are all very important facets to the band. And so it all starts with you guys. It all starts with you And how well, you know your band members, you know, if you have one guy who hates making social media posts, you don't want him to be in charge of social media posts, it's gonna come off lackluster, you know, eventually, you know, your fans are going to see through the, uh, disingenuous in posts you know they're going to see through, you know that you're just you're you're making post for the sake of making posts.

The point in all this is that you have to have a person assigned to each role. This is hard when you're living apart from each other. But like James was saying, it's all about communication. First things first. If you don't have an open communication chat threat of some sort with your band members. You need to do that instantly. There's multiple different platforms for this. I mean, there's slack. Slack is a great business channel. Or you can have literally everybody in your personal circle all inside of one chat threat.

And so you guys can all tackle things together. You can even build, you know, if you just wanna have a couple, you know, let's say it's You have to writing members and they need their own chat. Okay, well, you could do that, too. And you could start to compartmentalize all these different chats and things like that you might need if you don't have a program like slack. I mean, you could do it on Facebook Messenger, if you want, you could start a group chat, which I don't recommend, because then people are just gonna be getting text messages constantly, and that could be really, really, really daunting.

You know, the main thing is communication and making sure that you have a place you know, that that's this is the base is making sure that you have a place to communicate. You need a forum. If you can't all physically be in the same place. Well, then you need to have some sort of digital place that you can all be together. Yeah, I'm a massive fan of slack Facebook. Groups that are private also work really well. But Matt, like you're saying having separate channels and slack for different areas, it's so easy to just segment things.

And you can have everybody have access to everything or you can have on Lee. Certain people have access to certain things. So, for example, you know, if you had ah manager, you could have them in your channel but not put them in the song writing channel because they don't need to see that. Or you could put them in there. If you want their feedback on songs, it's all up to you. It's very granular how you can set things up, and it's a wonderful app for that. Facebook groups don't really do that.

Like if you're in a group, you see everything that's in the group. That's just how it ISS. But yeah, the main thing for any kind of group messages when there's no threads. And yeah, you know, Apple messages has threads now, but they're not great. The implementation was kind of poor, in my opinion, definitely. Yeah. One other thing to that, I think should be mentioned here is for members who do live far away, there should be an expectation. So they know who is paying for their transport to get to any in person rehearsals, recording sessions, anything like that.

It needs to be clearly outlined. Does that person pay for their own expenses to get there? Which makes sense because they're the one who lives far away. Or does the band budget pay for those travel expenses? Because it's a band activity? I think that's a great question. James and I think in any situation it's up to you guys. You know it's going to be what you determine. You know, if you're making good money, then let the band pay for it. If you're not making good money, let the individual pay for it.

But most importantly, you need to have a plan now for us. I live far away, but half of the magic for me in the music industry is going into the studio and recording. And it's not just about the music for me. It's also about the time spent in the studio with my bandmates. There's, Ah, certain level of intimacy that you have with your bandmates. You know, we all know this, like we develop closer relationships with our band mates. Then we will with anybody else. Sometimes that will lead to friendships falling apart.

And sometimes that leads to the closest relationships you've ever had in your entire life. Years ago on warp tour, I heard somebody say traveling together is like friendship, fast forward. What that means is, wherever you're at in your relationship with somebody, it's going to take you to the place that it's going to be for the rest of your life. If you have somebody who's, you know, you're on the fence with and then you go travel with them, you go start putting money in the group projects with them.

Those relationships. If they're going to deteriorate down the road, they're going to do this a lot quicker. And that's because now finances involved now like like yeah, they liked you when you're at your best. But are they gonna like you when they have been living in, you know? Ah, steel closet. Driving down the road at 60 miles an hour, when you guys haven't showered every day, you know, and maybe you haven't gotten a full meal in a couple days like these were things that that make it all really, really tough for me.

I've played with my band mates for a long time. I love my band mates. We know how we work very well together, and for me, I would never want to be in the studio without them. So, considering the exorbitant cost of recording, I advise you to fly to wherever your bandmates are and go to the studio together. That's what I would dio 100% of the time, because a it's cheaper for you probably buy a plane ticket than it is for you to go get like, two hours of studio time.

What's the going rate for studio time right now, James? It all depends on the studio, but to go to a major studio. The one I was interning at in San Diego, I believe, was about $600 a day, and that's without the engineer, the engineers. Another 400. So you're looking at $1000 for a day. If you don't have your own engineer and that's just an eight hour day. Yeah, I think they typically do a lockout. So if you wanted to stay all night, you could. But most people don't. Just because you get tired, you get burned out, especially if you're doing vocals or drums.

Guitarist can take a break for a now and come back to it. But if you blow out your voice, you're not coming back till at least the next day, right? And that's, you know, and those are important things to keep in mind when you're heading into the studio. The big thing is, is that you have thio really identify what is important about going to the studio if it's purely getting a good product. You mean you could do that at home? You could get your own recording software.

You could build your own booth. You could make your own demos. There are so many digital assets out here. There's so many programs applications that you can be constantly sending your music back and forth with each other pro tools. First, it's free pro tools that you can have. I think up to eight channels that you can send between whoever you want for free. So everybody in your band can all download pro tools first, record their own part in a scratch track and send it to each other for free.

The only catch with pro tools first is that if you are going to use plug ins, then you have to purchase pro tools plug ins. So that's a really, really great exchange of power. Pro Tools is a $400 program, so for them to say, Hey, here's a free version of it so that you guys can make your demos We realized that not every entry level musician is going to be coming in and going in and getting pro Tools 11 or Pro Tools 12 or what's the latest version? Pro Tools. 12.

Right now, the last number version is 12. They moved over to like, a yearly thing, so now it's, ah, year and month. So I think the latest version that they just put out is 2020 11. But the last full version before they change, too. That was 12. Yeah, the possibilities are endless. I mean, you guys could all use logic. You could all use fruity loops. You can use whatever Daw, you want, you can use Dropbox. Dropbox is a fantastic app to sync all of your band assets. I mean, all of your artwork, all of your demos, all of your masters, your mixes, You mean when we were talking about compartmentalizing with slack earlier?

Dropbox is the file version of that. So Dropbox is where you will compartmentalize all of your digital assets. And slack is where you will compartmentalize all of your conversations, all of your things, for keeping you orderly, their arm or APs than just these two for helping keep all of these things like neat and orderly. But the two of these make it really easy for you to keep communication thriving and keep you organized. And that's like, I mean, when you're building a network of people, if you're reaching out to some guy in Kansas for your album art and you're having your stuff mixed and mastered in California and you have a merch guy in New Jersey, you know, like thank goodness for digital assets because trying to keep all that stuff straight, you know, like back in the day, most of you probably don't know what a role indexes s go back and watch a movie from the nineties that has businessmen in it.

And it's literally business cards that spin, see equivalent of a businessman's recipe box. They literally have everybody's information with little tidbits about them and things like that. So that way, when they need to network with them, they can call them back. Now we have all these digital assets that make things easier. One of our earliest episodes was talking about staying organized and, you know, recording things from the very beginning. You know, charging all your numbers, things like that. This is a way that you can set yourself up for.

Success is making sure that all of your assets are inside of Dropbox and easy to access. Make sure that everybody in your band knows where they are and how to get to them. And then on top of that, making sure that you're having open and active communication about those and staying consistent with what people's responsibilities are. You know, if you're on a label and you have a deadline for putting out an album, then everybody needs to be working. You need to understand what that deadline is. You need to understand what your requirements are each and every person needs to understand what their role in the band is.

And if you don't have that, then you need to be having more conversations about it. It's very, very easy to give each person in your band a responsibility that continues to grow your brand. Absolutely. And I love that you brought up the roller Dex, cause that's something that we've mentioned in the past, although not quite a roller. Dex. We've talked about the digital version, which is a CRM customer relationship management program. And, yes, it has customer in the name. But it can also work for keeping in touch with business partners or associates or anyone in your network.

It comes in really handy to go and say, Okay, you know, I have a tag for merchandise. Here are all the merchandise providers we've ever worked Within the last hour along, our band's been together. We really like this one. Let's pick this one will reach out, see if they could do a rush order for us or whatever. All the information can be stored there, going back a little further to Dropbox. Oh, it makes everything so wonderful. I absolutely recommend spending the $12 a month to pay for Dropbox.

So you get the two terabytes of storage. Because with that, you can also then use what's called smart sharing, which basically says that all your files will show up in your Mac Finder, and I think they happen equivalent version for PC as well. But the files aren't actually taking up any space on Finder there in the cloud. And then as soon as you try to open the file with whatever app that file gets opened with, Dropbox automatically downloads it for you, and that file opens up. That is such a lifesaver.

I have so much more space on my computer because of this. Literally. We're talking about gigabytes, if not a terabyte of data, that is all in the cloud now. Obviously, I have backups of it. You should always have backups because if data doesn't exist in three places, doesn't exist at all. So you should have your computer on on site back up and a cloud backup, and that's what I have. I have my computer, I have time machine. I have Dropbox and I have back plays, so technically I have to offsite locations.

All that aside, there's also one other great app called file pass, which could come in really handy for long distance collaboration. It's actually designed for audio engineers to send files to their clients. So, like, Hey, here's the new mix. Let me know what you think and it plays the files at full quality. So if you send somebody away file, it will stream away file. And then you can leave time stamped comments just like you can on Soundcloud. But it's better, because on Soundcloud you're listening to 128 k bps stream, which is terrible quality file past doesn't compress that.

And so you could conceivably also use this for sending versions of ah, demo back and forth between songwriters or even, you know, if it's not a demo. If it's literally just idea, send that in and somebody could go and pinpoint one specific spot and say, Oh, like this right here, change this G chord to a C chord or something like that. It could be really handy for the song writing process. If you're not able, Thio work together because of distance or covert or anything else like that absolutely bringing up Cove.

It is perfect, because what we have seen here in the last few months is that there's been a shift from people working at a building to working at home. This is heavily reliant on personal accountability. That's what this is all about. Personal accountability is exactly what you need to A. If you're living apart from your band members, which most of you are, even if you're living in the same town you're not. Most of you probably aren't in the same house. So what does personal accountability look like?

Well, you're your own boss. You're gonna get out what you put in. So what's important to you when you wake up in the morning? If you have a boss that you have to answer to, you wake up. You take shower, brush your teeth, get ready, eat your breakfast, get your coffee and go sit down and start working because there's somebody holding you accountable. But what does that look like when you are holding you accountable? Are you actually a musician? That's the question that you need to ask yourself.

Are you going to get yourself out of bed and are you going to go pick up your instrument, and are you going to start creating art with it? If you're not doing this by yourself, your band will never succeed. Long distance. It won't work. It's like imagine having, ah, bunch of gears turning. And then if you remove one of those gears, none of the other gears will turn. You need every single cog in the machine to be moving continuously. And if moving one of those COGSA makes things a little bit harder within you, you know, whatever cog moves away, it's your responsibility to figure out how to continue to keep the system moving.

And it's very, very tough. It's not easy for me. I try to push myself to at least write a song a week. That doesn't happen all the time, you know, and honestly, sometimes I write the songs and they get scrapped. Sometimes I write a song. People love them and they get back. Bernard. Sometimes I wrote a song, and it's not the right style for what we're going for. This happens all the time, but the important part is that I'm consistently writing music. I would much rather have a whole bunch of music that my band mates like shoot down or that my label doesn't think you know are good enough than for me to be like, Oh, well, you know, I wrote to really good songs, but we need 10.

You're shooting yourself in the foot. So if every week I'm sitting down and writing a new song because that's Mawr my responsibility in the band than I need to have personal accountability and make sure that I am doing these things I need to communicate with my bandmates toe. Let them know that this is what I'm delivering to the table. And then, ideally, whoever in your band is in mawr of the managerial role. Hopefully, they have enough tenacity to turn and say, Hey, have you got that done yet?

That's one of the biggest things in a band is being able to turn to the people that you love and hold them accountable. Our society has kind of pushed accountability away from us and in the business world. And really I mean in the world of humans, in the world of human interaction and human emotion, you must have accountability. If you only have one or two band members. They're taking care of their responsibilities. Then if you're a four piece, well, then you really only have about 50% of your business working the way that it's supposed Thio.

So what do you do here is kind of what things look like. We'll take this directly into the music industry. What does this look like directly in each of your lives? Like if you live in different places in person, rehearsals like that was gonna be really hard, right? I don't fly up to Spokane, Washington, for us to practice once a week. That would be a very poor economic choice. And on top of that, we would be able to get much done because I'd be focusing on traveling and still trying to make sure that my life back here is happening and blah, blah, blah This instead of just saying hey, practices at home when you get together, you rehearse not something that I was told by my drummer a long, long time ago when he used to get mad at us, because when we were first starting out, we weren't talented at playing our own songs, and that would really make him irritated because he was classically trained and he said, You know what?

I practice these songs and I know them and you guys write the songs and you still don't know them. It was again that personal accountability. So what does it look like? What does it look like? You don't have practice. Instead, when you get ready for a tour, you show up five days early, and then you guys run practice for like, three days straight. And then when you're on your way to your tour, you have, like, one or two tuneup shows, and you do promote them. But they're generally not on the Tour Flyer.

If you go look at pretty much any major band and go look at their tour dates, you'll also notice if you do a little bit of digging that they played two or three shows before then, generally to help offset the costs of traveling to the first date of tour and to work out the kinks in their live performance. So the shift from being a local band where you're practicing once a week, you're rehearsing your music. You're trying to make everything work that you can that kind of shifts over to a instead of a week to week focus your thinking more now on a month to month focus.

Now you're saying, OK, if I'm gonna be gone for all of January? Our first date is January 1st and our last dates January 31st. But the first date starts in Kansas. And you live on the East Coast. Well, you need a couple shows to get you there. Well, now you're saying okay if I need a few shows to get me there, and we're gonna need a few days of practice. Well, maybe I should fly over there the last week of December, so that way, you know. Oh, well, actually, we know we're gonna have a show booked on the 31st.

We're gonna show booked on the 29th as well. Okay, well, if we need three days, so I'm gonna be there on this 26 then. So then you're saying Okay, I'm gonna take the red eye, you know, over the this, this part of the country and I'm gonna do things, you know? We're gonna start our tour. We're gonna start our practicing. That's when we're gonna get together. You basically are. Are never going to stop advancing if you're not learning your dying so make sure that you're consistently learning. Make sure that you're getting better.

When you write a song, you don't just write a song and throw it away. So you write a song, Put it in your Dropbox and either your bandmates listen to it right then. Or maybe, you know, maybe right then isn't the time to talk about writing new music. But you have that sitting there in a folder, ready to go Because you have been working, you have been consistently growing. Then when it's time to be like, Hey, guys, we're done with our first album cycle. Time to start thinking about writing the second one, and you're like, Oh, I've got four songs already sitting in Dropbox that, like these air demos, let me know if you guys like him.

Now your bandmates are gonna like every single one of them. Every one of your songs probably isn't gonna go on the album, but the point is, you're making personal growth. You are personally accountable. We don't have any excuses. I don't have to be in the same room. Is my band mates to write music with them. I can write a song recorded on pro tools first and send it over to my guitarist in Washington State. He can then plugging his guitar and he can track on it and send it right back to me.

We could literally do this in the same day. Figure out what works best for you and your band members figure out. You know, some people aren't tech savvy. Some people really like writing in the collective setting. You know, the jam band kind of feel. And if that's what works for you, then you also need to set aside a time for traveling there and actually writing that material. Whatever works best for you guys focus on that. But the easiest thing to do is use the digital assets that have been created.

A digital world is crazy and you can network so so well, there's no reason Thio and yet another episode of the podcast all wrapped up. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you got something out of this episode. Ah, short one. But I think a very important one because it really shows how important communication is. And we talk about communication over and over and over again. But especially when you are working on your own without your bandmates, you're far apart or co vid lockdowns have prevented you from getting together Any of that stuff, you have to remain accountable.

So I hope this episode is helpful. Just, you know, having clear expectations in advance about communication and tasks that need to be done is really what this boils down to. So thank you again for listening. We really appreciate it. We hope it's helpful to you. We'll be back with another episode next Tuesday at 6 a.m. Until then, having awesome week stay safe. And, of course, as always, keep rocking.