1403 - Why choose the punk ethic and release an album independently? - INTERVIEW
Thomas Cameron is a London based singer songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer who’s been around on the music scene since age 16. Starting of as a classical trained pianist and a self-taught guitarist, he since popped up in various guises including UK Rock Trio ‘Crystal Head’ writing and collaborating with artists such as House Music legend Sasha, Disturbing London's G-FrSH and Cypress Hill to name a few and he has also contributed to various film scores and advertising campaigns across a wide range of genres and styles. During this time, he was introduced to Grammy Award Winning Philadelphia based producer Joe ‘The Butcher’ Nicolo (Fugees, Billy Joel, Lauryn Hill). The pair quickly formed a unique bond which has seen Tom, using the artist name 1403, travel to the US on several occasions over the past couple of years to transform his solo demos into studio recordings. The result was debut album ‘Tethered’, released in February 2017.
Several more projects later, Tom is just now releasing an album named Somewhere Elsewhere. And it is different this time, not only in the conceptual approach to the creation of it, but also in the way he intends to release this album.
Read the full interview with Marie De La Montagne bellow:
“If you have a little bit of cash behind you to get this going and it’s your money, your tools, your data, it’s your fans, it’s your music, you’ve got complete control of how you want it to look, how you want to present it. Also you make it special and you give it your true self. You have such a level of analytics that you can send something to your fans at their postal address. I get passionate when I’m talking about it because something’s clicked in my brain and I ask myself, what the f*** was I doing all this time? Planets have aligned but it’s exciting.”
Marie: Hi Tom, how are you and what have you been up to with the release of Somewhere Elsewhere?
Tom: How are you, hello. Yeah good, been really busy getting everything done for the release day. The video is out next week and the album is out two weeks from yesterday. So yeah, fully, fully loaded, campaigns are ready to roll, looking forward to sending it out. It’s been a bit of an experiment for me, this new method so we’ll see how it goes.
Marie: So what do you mean by getting the campaign ready to roll, what did you decide to do this time?
Tom: Well, so obviously there’s the whole registration process for every album. And basically what I’ve done, is I took all the middle men out of the situation. I was signed to this label a while ago, that came to an end, there were different management companies trying to get involved, and different labels, and I was just like - a lot of this feels just like noise to me, especially because of last year, and everything that we’ve been dealing with, and I sat back and thought: “What am I actually going to get out of everyone else being involved? The person who’s most concerned about this is me, the distance, even though we’re a billion miles apart and we’re disconnected in the physical sense, we’re also super connected for different kinds of reasons, and even more so as the result of the pandemic, and I realised, I have direct access to the people that I’m selling to .. And you know what, it’s that word, more than anything. I finally got to this point, like I think it was James Brown said, music is 80% business, 20% music or something like that. And I know it sounds horrible but I know I’ve got a product, I know that I can continue to make it and I can create music under all these different hats and guises and now it’s just the case of, I’m spending money and time on creating something, and now I wanna sell it. I don’t think that that’s something an artist should be embarrassed about, and there are mechanisms and ways that we can monetize stuff.
Marie: Absolutely! I agree with you completely. I had a similar experience of always seeing music as a place where things could be better and work better, but maybe I was a bit in a denial of it being a business and seeing that understanding it as a business is my responsibility. And I think seeing it as a business is actually liberating, cause you spare yourself disappointment and you don’t set yourself up for being used, like you said.
Tom: Yeah, and like any business on this Earth, to be able to monetize anything, and it has a lot to do with personal taste. I went through the whole journey of wanting to be the thing, wanting to be the artist, the known artist, a notoriety. And this won’t suit everybody, but the thing that pissed me off about the industry is that it’s the worst industry there is really, in terms of the ways that the creator, the person who’s actually got the product is treated. Luckily, a lot of the young artists won’t actually experience that … what we did in the late 90s 2000s, still hanging on the the 60s and 70s mindset that you just get in the van and you go do gigs and everything’s going to be amazing, get signed on this mega deal and you get millions of pounds, you get the jet and the swimming pool, and it’s not really like that any more. I suppose it never really was except for the super stars anyway.. In a weird way, it’s became a lot more saturated and there’s a lot more people who are awful, but then there’s also a million more ways now to distribute, present your music, reach a new audience directly, sell other products or art pieces besides music for those who are inclined that way, you can sell directly to your customer without having to worry about any of the shit that goes in the middle and the people that are trying to cut off the top.
As I say, this is an experiment, I’m treating the next 9 months as an experiment of how it works for me. I’ve seen models, examples of how it can work for people and I will do everything I can possibly do to use the data that I’m given and the mechanisms and tools I’ve got to make it successful. We’ll see but I’m excited, because I’m coming to a different stage in my life where I actually want to move more into the sync world and more into the studio world anyway. I’m lucky enough to have done the amount of shows that I’ve done, I played in the biggest venues that I wanted to play in. I’m not naive to the thought that I’m talking from a privileged point here. But it’s encouraging for people and if it works for me, I’ll definitely be looking to - if not guide people through that process - invest and help people out who are trying and might not have the start up capital to be able to do it, if you know what I mean.
Marie: I think seeing yourself as privileged is very self-critical, because of the way the industry is. It is wrong on so many levels and historically and it’s gotten better in many ways but there are also problems that weren’t there before. And there are ways around it but still, it’s kind of a lottery, right?
Tom: Absolutely.
Marie: Like a game, is it going to work? Are people going to respond to it? I have heard many artists say that they have lost their ego, that they no longer need to be a big success. But I think it’s maybe the relief of how much more available this has become, that there’s not some gatekeeper somewhere being a tastemaker basically and dictating what do people listen to. That’s not there any more, and when you’re liberated of that, you don’t need to push your ego, you just keep creating.
Artwork for Somewhere Elsewhere, released 02.03.2021 >>> listen
Tell me about this album, it’s very different from the stuff you hear. A lot of music sounds the same nowadays. Your album is very instrumental, very spacey, it’s like a message to somebody, and it feels like it comes from a place of love. Can you talk about the album a bit?
Tom: This album is a follow-up to the 2018 record Tethered that I made in Philadelphia. I made a couple of little records in between but it was predominantly recorded in between and during some of the lockdowns last year and half of it was written during that time as well. And this particular record was the first time I had a title first, because it was a trail of thought that I’ve been thinking about and I was looking through my previous writings, and because I work a lot and all the time, I never really have the moment of hindsight and take-a-breath moments to look back and see what I was writing about. Cause I don’t consciously write about anything, it’s all sporadic, a stream of consciousness, and I only get what it was about in a while, in a way.
I think this was a conscious effort to encapsulate something, it was much more focused in comparison to some of the other stuff that I’ve done. I sat down with my producer Denis White, a good friend of mine, who I’ve worked on some electronic music in the past. We spoke about it and wanted to make something that used organic instruments and utilised the space that we were going to be recording in, as we were recording in some amazing rooms, and recording studios, so we wanted to capture the sound of the rooms because it felt real, but we wanted to go down an experimental road, almost mess it up via analog synthesizers and recording techniques and postproduction so as to send it, taking the title literally, somewhere elsewhere.
There’s a lot of escapism in it, a lot of loving, and longing. Not so much something that’s in the past but something that you’re striving for in the future, eternally. It’s not like I’m talking about an ex-girlfriend or a job that I didn’t get in the past, it’s an almost spiritual record for me. I was doing a lot more meditation and breathing exercises because I feel the world is a complete hectic mess as we all feel at times I don’t know, I had moments of clarity and peace and calm over the last year, spending a lot of time just taking the time to spend time. Lyrically it’s about escapism and about something above and beyond where we are at the moment and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, so it was Somewhere Elsewhere. It encapsulated where I was at the time and these words kept standing out, and it sounded nice and rolled off the tongue and I built the record around that. There’s a couple of songs on there that are from older recordings, that I never really got right, so I stripped those back to purely acoustic, with no click in one take with just vocals, which is how I do it live, so there’s a bit of reminiscing in there. But it was probably the most focused that I’ve ever been on what I want the end product to be. I’ve never really worked like that before.
Marie: Yeah, it’s very well said. It sounds like it, the escapism, but also it is very present, it’s the emotional and spiritual feeling, the longing but also, the focus on what do I want to manifest, it’s comforting, and you just want to keep listening to it. It also has a different structure, the songs.
Tom: Yeah, there’s one or two that go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, but the rest of them are, say, pieces, they’re not trying to be predictable, traditional songs.
Marie: So regarding the release of this album, you decided to do it completely independent. I know you stripped your social media, which some would say violates the algorithms, you’re telling this black and white story on there now. So what’s the build-up?
Tom: The first point of the “why this” is, as an artist, like me, who’s been through the mill a little bit - I toured a lot with numerous bands, fronted bands, written for bands, toured with bands, supported as a singer, etc. etc., I’ve been around the block a bit, so to speak. You know, my last record was released under a label, a subsidiary of Sony, and to be honest with you, I realised a year or two ago that the worst experiences that I’ve had during my musical life had been during the time I was associated with or dealing with a record label or a management company linked to a record label.
You’ve got this product, your music, your craft, your songs and your performance, your live show and then someone comes along and says: “I can take this, you’ll come with me, I’m going to sell it to this other company, and we’re going to make loads of money.” And you say “ok, this person is superconnected, knows all these people, they’re introducing me to them and taking me for drinks with this person and all these interesting interviews and chats are happening and people are getting involved and everyone loves me…” and then you start making your music, your record, and the clock ticker starts and also every time you spend some money, that becomes a loan or an expense and it starts to become more of a business agreement, as opposed to what most artists set out to do, which is to play music, right. Albeit, most artists aspire to make money from music, so you don’t have to work in Tesco or wherever, but my experience is, that as soon as there is any chink in that process of you saying yes to certain things being done and the way that you’re marketed and the way that your music is going to be distributed because “that’s how it’s done”, if there is any argument in that process, then relationships can break down quite quickly, and that becomes frustrating because you feel like you’re not promoting your art in the way you think it should be just to satisfy someone else. Also, you start to realise that unless you are extremely successful and you sell a ton of music and you play the game so to speak, you don’t really make any money whatsoever and you’re actually making money for other people. So you almost become a subcontractor to a bigger entity, like you’re on the shop floor, and all these guys are in the office and you’re doing all the work, and you’re not gonna get any return and you pack your own rig after a gig and you work around the clock and you do a tour and you end up giving 10% or 15% or 20% to a manager who’s not doing anything and you come away from it, like I did, bruised and quite bitter about the whole situation, and it almost makes you feel like you don’t wanna keep making music because you are tired, frustrated, you are taken for granted, and you’re not feeling creative or happy.
So it came to an end with this particular record company, and I started to make music and put out music again, because I had so much stuff on the shelf and I had some listeners, so I put 3 or 4 different projects out, made a collaboration record, just got back to loving making music, putting music out and having people experience my music - to a limited audience but doing what I wanted to do again, so I made an instrumental record with a friend in the States and an 80s pop record with another friend in the States that just so detached from anything that I would have done as 1403.
So then when I was making this record, the one that’s just to come out, I wanted to take a different approach. So I met up with a few different companies following some research I’d done on new methods arising regarding distribution and streaming. The old romantic side of me didn’t want to let go of that “you’ve got to get out there, you need to get on the road”, but I started to see the methods of monetizing your music via adverts and other tools and I was interested to learn more got introduced to a group of guys in New York and I got on with them really well and I started talking to them about how this process really works and ultimately talking from a position where I have got some cash that I can invest in this process. I understand that not everyone is in this position and I’m not taking it for granted or undermining anybody who isn’t in this position, but ultimately, what they described to me was all news to me.
So there’s a methodology where you can create adverts through social media, search engines and all the different platforms, combine them and link them to all of your distribution platforms, because they all talk to each other or are owned by each other, and use all of the data analytics that comes back from the targeted adverts and then basically get a database of who your audience is, globally, and where people are more likely to click on your songs, return to your music. There’s a billion people out there trying to sell bot driven stuff. Like charging 5000$ to get you 20 million streams on your song on Spotify. And that’s all good but it’s 20 million streams in 5 days and then back to 10 the next five days. So it’s instant, not returning listeners and followers.
Marie: Yeah I think they’re called recurring listeners.
Tom: Yeah, and there are so many people out there trying to do that, you see adverts and every time you put a hashtag on your platform, you’re bound to get an email or a message from one of these companies. Just crap companies that people spot from miles off. They don’t build your audience, they just flash sale your audience and then it just drops again. That can leave you with an empty feeling and a lot of fake accounts following you. People who’ve been through that will know what it’s like and I urge people not to go down that route.
But the release of this album is more of a long term plan and going back to the point of why I want people to consider it is, in a way, going back to the punk ethic. Just do it yourself. F*** all the record labels, the middle men, the management … it’s almost like getting in the van again just with your guitar but on the internet. Because you’re basically saying that you will put some of your own money in and choose what my product is and I’ll find my audience and if someone doesn’t like it, f*** them, I’ll move over to where they might like it. It’s a bit geeky and you need to have an analytical brain but if you get your head around what you’re seeing and doing and target these ads in better places, basically I’m predicting that I can make a good return on the investment, the money that I spent on what I’m selling. That’s where the romantic thing needs to go out the window a little bit. Because ultimately, you need to make money to be able to make music to be able to make money to stop working at Tesco.
Marie: Yeah, it’s not romantic and it’s more business, but you’re still talking about real people. You know your audience, you talk directly to them and the end goal is to grow that audience. Not only will you make a return but you will also grow your streaming numbers by real listeners, it’s possible thanks to these methods. And this is where we can still be artistic and human.
So who is your audience and how do you engage with them?
Tom: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is and it’s interesting that you picked up on the fact that the socials are relatively empty. This is where you can still portray yourself whatever way you want to. But at the same time, there’s a thing I always like about people, and certain artists, that there is still an element of mystery going on. So I will limit the content, but make the content quality, because I still think there are people who don’t want to know what I had for dinner on Tuesday and what dog I’ve got. And maybe some people do but this is about the control, that I’m not going to have anybody telling me that we’ll do a TikTok campaign next week and you’ll dress up in a leotard because that’s what people want to see. F*** all that.
If you have a little bit of cash behind you to get this going and it’s your money, your tools, your data, it’s your fans, it’s your music, you’ve got complete control of how you want it to look, how you want to present it. Plus, if it doesn’t work one month, because I posted a certain thing or people react a different way, you can move it around, you can shift your parts, react to it, you can see what works. You’re in complete control of your destiny, of how much or how little you want to do. Some people would be happy to just get another couple hundred followers. It depends how far you want to take it. And fundamentally, if the music is s***, people aren’t going to listen to it anyway. And you could push it down people’s throats, and unless it’s like a gimmick record, like a joke song, you can plug stuff into that, I get that. But ultimately, if the music quality is not good, people will not listen to it or buy it.
So this is an important thing after the record is done, the next stage, that you can give as much or as little as you want, and still control where you’re going. I could also wh*** myself out on every platform, but me being me, I’m going to just keep myself to myself and post little nuggets of music and visuals and content that I want to put out.
Marie: Yes, and there are artists that stand out for this to me, other than the artists that fall for the negative side of social media and post constantly and maybe they grow their likes and numbers, but that never translates to money. And I understand why artists livestream and post their music nowadays during lockdown, but essentially they are giving their music away for free. And even from the point of view of someone who would want to work with them and fight for opportunities for them, that is just a little hard to relate to. As someone who works as a producer, promoter, publisher or even sync - I look at that stuff. And I tell artists not to go that desperate, not to compromise. You become a slave to constantly making content to put something out, and the way it comes across is that it gets buried in the sea of content, it makes me feel saturated. And even if I like or know your songs, it would be very hard to do any more with that, it will just stagnate right there. But there are ways, like you said that you want to get into sync, where there’s money, and it’s not even limited to your territory, and I could almost say it’s so much more serious and self respectful to do that, rather than TikTok. Of course it can be super fun if that’s your style, but like with the record you’ve written, I can’t imagine it on there.
Tom: You hit the nail on the head there. Let’s take a number, like a million streams on Spotify gets you 7000$. That sounds like a big number, and it is, but if you do everything you can, through advertising or spending some money to generate something that is a potential recurring listener you can live comfortably on that. And that’s a better return that a lot of artists will tell you they made last year if they were just doing the circuit gigging. And I know it all sounds like money money money but f*** it, what are we doing it all for anyway?
Marie: Yeah because it’s work, money is not a rude work. And I have also been there but I also grew out of it because it’s so frustrating to have to do it for free or even pay for it and for everybody else. And to have to compromise and to have that judgement from your peers, family or even yourself that you are not earning on it and you should be doing other things with your life. It’s a very painful topic and it sort of grew clearer last year. It leveled all the politics and it became a conversation in decision-making places which is great. I also had a lot of artists tell me that they tuned more out of the competition and more into themselves and meditated more and focused more on the music but they also talk about money more. And it’s becoming more transparent on how do these methods work and how does playlisting work and it’s becoming more available. And it’s all shifted to where this industry wants to go.
Tom: Yeah and it’s taken the industry a while to work itself out after the digital and online took over. Before the internet, you’d buy a record. A physical record would be priced at say £15. Now with the internet, there’s not a shelf life to the continuous revenue that could come in. Before you could sell one unit one time, now you can sell one unit a million times. Because it’s a stream, as opposed to a disk or a vinyl. It’s gotten better in some ways.
Marie: Yes, I think people started to understand the logic of licensing more. You could see it even in the discussion in the UK Parliament on the Economics of streaming and this topic popped up, whether it’s a sale, a rental, and how the remuneration should be decided. And in the light of this, the licensing is a way to tie the artist and the track, wherever it goes, you lose all the middle men, and you keep the direct contact of the fan and the artist. You can read the news about bitcoin and the new technologies that are coming into the industry like bitcoin as well. But seeing these trends coming in so quickly, it makes me feel incredibly hopeful about the independent scene. And I think this will also make people understand that they have to pay for these things. Music is not free. This mentality has to shift by being exposed to enough evidence that you change your mind. But it’s unstoppable. Once it’s digital, then it’s global, and it’s everywhere. It won’t just stop at the border and stay there.
Tom: It’s like the underground, punk scene, and I keep going back to that but it’s a finger up to the executive part of the industry. And it scares people, especially the labels.
Marie: Yes, but you start to see the solutions are there. And again, it’s by seeing music as a business that opens your eyes to it, and you stop being in a bubble and a utopia and stop romanticizing it.
Tom: You can be in a bubble when you’re creating the music, I’m in my own world all the time, you can turn it off and on. The process of making music is like that for me. What I’m trying to do now is the part once the product is ready to go. You need to put in the same amount of hours as the creation, and you don’t need anyone else. You just need to pull your finger out and get on with it.
Marie: And just a note, there are entities, especially in the States, that offer loans to artists, based on evaluating their data, and work like an advance, but it’s not a record label deal. I don’t think people really necessarily understand just what is wrong with a label deal. That you are never going to pay off such a deal, and you don’t own anything and all the money is going somewhere else. For the people who don’t have the finances, they can borrow it, and pay it off from merch, touring, and so on. And that’s empowering, and so that’s a good thing. So I think educating yourself enough that you are not afraid to go and do it. And it shows, when you do that, you take yourself seriously, and that’s such a different vibe.
And yeah, it’s not going to be for everyone but you have got to take the power back.
Marie: Yeah, and for building your career up, there are no borders so much, these things are universal. And there are so many ways you can go about it, you can do a lot for free but you can turn that into business, like influencers do.
Tom: Exactly, and as your campaign grows and you see the traffic numbers, you can open up new services, your own websites, songwriting coaching or webinars and so on. Creating another product within your fanbase, with people that want to interact with you. There’s this website that does it well, Patreon. You subscribe to it on a monthly basis but there are different layers and you have exclusive content where people can bid against each other, and win a direct Zoom call and go through songs with the top fans. Anyway what I mean is that there are just so many ways to make money out of music. People want to do this. If you find a way to interact with a fan and find a way to make money out of it, and you make them the happiest people in the world, why would you not do that?
Marie: As you meet more opportunities you go and meet it and it’s better than having it planned out like a construct and it’s all business.
Tom: Also you make it special and you give it your true self. You have such a level of analytics that you can send something to your fans at their postal address. I get passionate when I’m talking about it because something’s clicked in my brain and I ask myself, what the f*** was I doing all this time? Planets have aligned but it’s exciting and in three months time, we should have another chat and see how things worked. I guarantee you this won’t fall on its a**.
Marie: Sure, we absolutely must! Good luck Tom, look forward to next time!
You can find everything about Tom on his page https://www.1403music.com/
