Navigating New Music Promotion and Innovation with Alison Ball

Welcome. This is the Public Relations Review Podcast, a program to discuss the many facets of public relations with seasoned professionals, educators, authors, and others. Now here is your host, Peter Woolfolk.

Welcome to the Public Relations Review Podcast and to all listeners all across America and around the world. Now, apple Podcast has ranked this podcast among its top 1% of podcasts worldwide, so thank you to all of my guests and listeners for making this happen. Now here's the question Musicians need publicity and exposure as much as other performers or businesses. So what techniques, outreach and other activities and methods does a recognized senior executive in the music industry use to promote their artist and music in today's wide array of beauty outlets?

My guest today has been described as an unstoppable phenomenon in the entertainment industry for 30 years. She was also a former vice president of Warner Brothers Records. Currently, she has partnered with Grammy nominator singer Eric Benet to launch JBR Creative Group. This new firm is focused on younger musicians, to help them monetize, expand and, above all, achieve success in the music industry. In addition, she is also president of Tune Go Music Technology. Tune Go Music brings blockchain technology to the music world today. Now add to that her consulting services that provides the agency expertise to brands and other CEOs wanting to harness the allure, the sparkle and the cachet of the entertainment industry. So joining me today from Los Angeles, California, is the CEO of JBR Creative Group, Alison Ball. Alison, welcome to the podcast.

Oh, thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

Well, let's look into this Now. You say that. Well, from our point of view, what are some of the range of activities and the outreach efforts that you bring to the fore to help your new clients get exposure and grow?

Well, you know, my job is never ending. I am the CEO of JBR, but I'm the CEO, the mother, the housekeeper, the cook, the psychiatrist, the A&R department. I mean really I'm blessed that I've been doing this for a very long time, from college, from UC Berkeley to now, always been in the entertainment business. And you know, I started, you know, very humbly, as an assistant in a management company a very successful management company out of college, moved my way into the record business and moved up all the way up at Warner Brothers to running the whole A&R department and then starting my own company with Eric Benet and it's just been an amazing journey.

So really, what I do is I oversee all aspects. I actually make the records. You know I sign artists. So I help look for artists, sign artists, help pick their songs. If they write their own songs, I put them with the right producers. I also oversee all their marketing, their social media, the promotion team. I mean really I do a gamut of everything and for me it's very prideful because it's really about taking somebody with a vision who's super talented, and helping them see that vision all the way to their Grammy nominations, grammy winning, selling records, and it really is an amazing journey to help creative individuals turn into profitable, fun, amazing artists.

Now, when you say promotion team, does that mean you guys and ladies sit around the table and have a conversation with the artist and also look at the things that you do well and where they would fit? How does that work?

It's just everything is the X we do? We sit around the table, we discuss stuff, we sit on Zoom nowadays, but, yes, really, the promotion team and marketing team. After we turn in a record, I play the record for them, usually in person, because you want it personable and then we talk about strategy. The strategies of music business when I started are completely different. Well, maybe not completely different, but drastically different than they are today.

Because when I started there was no social media. It was we have a hit record, let's put the artist on the road, let's go to radio, start connecting the docs and the artist starts performing. Wow, launching a new artist really starts in social media and it's how do you put them in social media so people start paying attention to them? Then you put their songs out and streaming and once their song starts connecting on the streaming platforms and they get on the right playlist, then we add them, then we go to radio. If they go to radio, and it's just a different format now, it's a lot more smaller entities that you have to know how to do to break an artist when it comes to social media. Instagram, facebook, tiktok, all of that, soundcloud, the streaming platforms, spotify, apple, etc. All those elements now are put in with also having a great record going on tour and also eventually going to radio.

So, in essence, you have a team that is familiar with all of digital, if you will, online platforms that accept the particular type of music that you play in a game that is country and is probably R&B and rock roll, jazz. They all have their own online platform, so you have to be aware of who they are, perhaps have relationships with them as well.

Right, exactly, so I do have a team and it's an ever-growing team because not all people on the team like, sometimes, the person that works for Apple Playlist is not as strong as the person that works for Spotify Playlist. So you have team members for different genres. For instance, eric Benet, my business partner, who we're about to put a new record out. He's traditionally R&B, so that's a separate team than our new young emerging artist, maxine Ashley, who is crossover pop. So there's different teams who work different formats and, yes, they all report to me.

So most of my day, besides the creative time of making records because that's always first for me, because you can't do any of this unless you have great music and great artists but most of my day is managing the teams. What do you need? Where are we at? How do we move this? How do we grow? And then they tell me what they get back from the public, from the Playlist, from the DJs. I really take all that input very serious because it gauges where you are and how to break your artists what they like, what they don't like, what's accepting, how do we move forward? So it's an ever-moving puzzle working with artists.

So at what point do you decide? And look at the artist okay, fine, they've gotten some exposure, they've risen up the ratings, if you will on the charts, other sort of media exposure when does that kick in? What yardstick do you use to measure to say, finally, let's see if we can get them some TV exposure contracts to represent soft drinks, airlines or whatever it happens to be?

Well, that's a really good question, because we're in the process of that right now with Maxine and Ashley, our new artist. But it usually is after you start getting significant playlists and then if you're going to radio, like we went with Maxine, you've got a radio and the radio starts really kicking in. People usually start calling you, or we also have teams of outreach that we call and say, hey, we're looking for an endorsement, we're looking to partner up with a brand and we really correlate the brand with who the artist is. And that's just the cherry on top, because everybody wants that. So it's one of those things that you do have to be connected. But once you start getting exposure, especially in the magazines the Vogue and the music business magazines and your record really starts showing real traction you know what I mean Then we start reaching out to brands. We start reaching out what tours you're going to go on.

It kind of becomes a groundswell where sometimes an artist can get lucky and a brand just hears a song because they love it or a TV show, a producer or a music supervisor can hear a song because it fits a scene in a hot TV show and he gets placed and then that skyrocket. So there's no real science to it, it's just you got to put it all out there and then be ready when the right opportunity shows up, and then sometimes you get break, sometimes it takes longer. Really depends Each artist. Each project is always completely different.

You know it sort of strikes a familiar chord out. You perhaps know that, as I said, some years ago I produced a Jazz CD, and when I say I produced it I don't play the music, but I knew a lot of musicians here in Nashville who were jazz, but folks never think about jazz in Nashville. So I put together a Jazz CD and what I did after work was find all the jazz stations around the country and sent them CDs Rather than just an empty box, and also had a brief bio of each player, each track on the CD, and that thing is still getting exposed around the world. So I mean that was probably minuscule compared to what you do for the myriad of people you have coming into your shop on a regular basis.

Yeah, yeah, you know the thing of it is breaking new artists nowadays. It really is about traction, it's about working with other people. I mean, it all starts with the music. If the music is not great, then it's hard to get traction. But you know, now, doing the music is the easy part. It really is all these other tentacles that you have to do with the social media, with the branding, with the touring, with all these different things. You know, we still take our artists out to radio stations to meet the DJs and it's funny, the producer is super important in making the record vitally important. What producer makes your record? But also the DJ community is just important at breaking your record. So it's all those tentacles that go on at once that you have to manage with an artist so people can hear them, because if people don't hear them, there's a lot of great artists. There's tons of great artists that people never even know about. It's about how you get the attention on your artist and then scale from there.

Well, I think that's an interesting point. So give me a couple of ideas. When you say get attention for your artists, what are some of the techniques that you've actually used to raise their visibility publicly?

You know it's really funny. I'll give you an artist right now who's on our label, maxine Ashley, and I wish I could take credit for this, but I can't, it was just tiny. So Maxine Ashley, before we signed her, was on a song with Black Coffee, who is an Afro DJ, and his record won a Grammy and she was one of the feature songs on it. She wrote it, sang it with him and he called her to come perform at Madison Square Garden. We had our first single, somebody Else, already recorded, ready to go, and we knew that was the opportunity. Oh, maxine is going to be at Madison Square Garden, her hometown, new York, in front of 15,000 people singing the Black Coffee song, but then we're going to drop her single, her new single, out at all formats. So it was a timing thing and it really worked. It worked because she got to get up on stage in front of 15,000 people and say, hey, my new single Somebody Else is at the DSPs, it's at Spotify, it's at Apple Go, follow me, and it's from her song, her new song and got her traction where radio stations started jumping on it right away. People started asking her to come perform.

So something as little as performing at the right place, which is Madison Square Garden, which is really big, especially for your first big performance ever, and it was an opportunity that us as a record company a small record company were ready to jump into it. So it's little things like that that happen. Sometimes it's you're on the right playlist, right, you send your music out to all the playlists and the biggest playlist in the world picks up on your song and you get exposure to millions of people. It's so different for so many different ways. For Maxine it was the Madison Square Garden, the connection of Black Coffee. She had a hit song, radio knew her name and then it started spiraling from there.

So what other techniques Maybe? I should ask how many different artists have you signed to your new label right now?

Our new label is very, very small. So right now we have Two, three signs and one in negotiation. So we're always going to be a small label. So I don't know if we're ever going to have more than, at the top, maybe 10? I don't even know if we'll get that far, just because we're trying to be a very well oiled machine, because not only do we make records, we also have TV shows, we're putting tours together. So we're just not just a record company, we are a creative agency. So we'll be doing some of everything. But I mean, in my life I've signed. Well, let me see, I don't even know how many artists I've signed by myself, but when I was at Warner Brothers I had a hundred artists report to me, including Prince and Chaka and people like that, so Curtis Mayfield when I walked into Warner Brothers they had a huge roster and my job was to oversee the whole roster. Besides finding acts, I also took care of the legacy artist and I was a very busy woman.

Well, I mean, you've got not only the JBR group, but you've also got the Toon Go music. Now, I mean, that sounds a little bit different. So how does Toon Go music, how does that help me understand what the blockchain technology is and how that impacts the music world?

Okay, so Toon Go is a very interesting, amazing company. I've actually been with them for six years and we now are. You know, we've had a couple. We've changed a few different iterations of where we've been in technology, but at the moment we're doing collectibles. So we take an artist like a legacy. I just did the usher drop.

You take usher and you take his album and you move it over to the blockchain and people who do collectibles, who buy art and buy music on the blockchain, they buy the record and what happens which is very unique about this is that how the payment goes out, where when an artist puts a record out now and they go out to streaming, they don't see their money for a very long time. The record company gets it. It doesn't pay. Well, the blockchain is different. We set up wallets where the artist or whomever designated gets paid. They get paid a dollar one. So now it becomes transparency on money. It's in US dollars and people are getting paid directly ASAP. Toon Go does not collect the money. We take our percentage for putting you up on the blockchain and transitioning into our marketplace, but the money goes directly into the artist's hands and it goes into or whomever owns the master's. So if it's a record company, then they get paid a dollar one. They're not waiting for a check coming from any other entity At sale one. They get paid.

So it's really revolutionizing the music business. If you have a big fan base, if you're a legacy artist and you're not signed to a major label, you can make more money doing this because it's not cut up with streaming and all that. So it's the wave of the future and it's still really new and we have been onboarding clients. So I've done deals with Method man and Smoob and we did the Usher Drop and it's really exciting. It's still new. A lot of people are still, oh, how does that work? But our platform at Toon Go, we have a player.

So anybody who buys one of the collectibles, buys music, buys the project. They can actually listen to it on their phone like they listen to anything else. You can't transfer it out. So it can't be transferred because you don't own the music. But it really is like a baseball trading card where you actually have it on your phone and it's numbers and it's a collectible and then you can resell that on our marketplace as well. So it really is the wave of the future. It's really fun. We gamify it. Most times. We give you bonus tracks or extra artwork or you get concert tickets. It's almost like a Willy Wonka ticket where, oh, I got the music and I get first access to the concert. So it's purely for super fans who want to come in and own a unique collectible that they can transfer or they can keep and get additional stuff because it's on the blockchain.

You know, it seems to me from time to time you have heard that some record companies have not paid their orders, not what they should have paid them, all those kinds of discrepancies that have been taking place that a lot of folks will be flocking to a system such as this blockchain that you have set up, because it's more accountable to them and they can see their money much faster and in the right quantities that they should be receiving.

Yeah, it will be picking up. You know it's so funny the collectible markets they were called the NFTs back in the day. You know everybody was selling big ones and they kind of got quiet. It felt like when the internet first started. It's like, you know, it was a big deal about the internet and cryptocurrency and all that and then it kind of went quiet. This is the wave of the future. This is really about artists seeing dollar at dollar one. But it's still new. It's still, you know, people understanding Once I got into music business and I've been in it over 30 years it's not a fast transitional business People who make the decisions and even artists.

It's hard for them to adopt new things. That's why streaming took over the music business. They were trying to work with the record companies and they're like, eh, we don't know, we don't know, we don't want to change our format because, honestly, the record companies were benefiting. You know what I mean. And then streaming jumped in and now they own the music. So the music business so it's one of those things that it will become. It is the future. It will become super powerful. But it's onboarding people. Getting people to trust, getting people to understand the new format takes time.

Well, Allison, you have provided us a wealth of information. Is there anything that you think we might have missed in this discussion today?

Well, I think that you know I'd love for everybody to come follow us at jbrcom and on Instagram. My Instagram is alisonbaughmediacom or jbrcom on Instagram, but not really. I think it's just about supporting artists and if you have great artists and you love artists, we'll support them. Go to their concerts, look up all their information, and it really is about supporting the arts. I also sit on the board of Guitar Center Music Foundation, which I would love people if they want to give to kids in music schools and help kids with musical instruments. You could go to my alisonbaughmediacom and you can contribute to the Guitar Center Music Foundation. We are having a big event April 4th where we're honoring Ernie Isley. So I'm about giving music back to children because music really heals our soul and my oldest son, who's autistic, is a trumpet player and music has saved his life. So anything you can give back to the arts is worth it to me, because I just love music and music is really our soundtrack to our life.

Well, alson, let me say thank you so very, very much for joining us on the Public Relations Review Podcast today, and I'm sure that our listeners will benefit quite a bit from what you've had to say to them today, and I'd also like to ask the viewers that, if you've enjoyed the show, please, if you'd like to get a review from me and also share this with your colleagues and also listen to the next edition of the Public Relations Review Podcast.