This is an interview taken from the research The Online Music Economy for Independent Music Entrepreneurs.
Yinka Oyewole is the founder and front man of afro-punk rock band Sabatta. I spoke to Yinka in November 2008 to find out more about his views of the rapidly changing music economy and his experiences as a self-releasing artist in the digital age.
You can listen to an audio version of our full interview here.
Susi O’Neill: Tell me a bit about Sabatta, how did you form the band and who’s involved?
Yinka Oyewole: Sabatta really began in 2006, it was myself and at that time a partner in a studio I was running. It was a four piece originally, now it’s a three piece. From the beginning one thing that’s maintained is we’ve done a lot of promotion over the internet.
SO: What records have you put out so far – if records isn’t an un-cool term?
YO: I like the term. We’ve put out so far four releases – first one is Princess Raw the EP – four songs at end of 2006. 2007 the album, we put out a CD and DVD package, and a DVD with three live song. In September we put out an EP “Didn’t C It” and we’ve just put out a new album “Emperor’s New Clothes”.
SO: How would you describe your sound?
YO: I’ll describe it like people have described it to me: it’s kind of like Led Zeppelin meets Queens of the Stone Age meets Hendrix. Someone said if Lenny Kravitz did stoner rock, this would be it. And also a little bit like if Marvin Gaye played rock music.
SO: How have you started to build an audience and an engagement with your fan base?
YO: Well a lot has come through MySpace, Facebook as well. Basically we contact fans – or potential fans – we look at other similar artists that are on those sites and we may contact their fans and see if they like what we’re doing.
SO: Is that not quite a manual process to go through, if you say want fans of Queens of the Stone Age website to click through to each fan? Does it not take longer than maybe traditional flyering outside a gig?
YO: It’s quite labour intensive, yes. We still do flyers and things like that. The thing is, so many people listen to music now on the internet that you have to do that. It’s a little bit more laborious than previous methods may have been.
SO: You mention MySpace which is a top destination site for musicians – what other tools and platforms are you using to promote your work?
YO: Facebook is another one, but it’s slightly different. With MySpace, I find it works more internationally but it’s also a bit more remote. What I mean by that is you’re going to get people who like your music on MySpace but they might not come to a gig.
SO: Is that because your audience is quite diffused around the world?
YO: Yes. You can get loads of hits because you can get people from all over looking at it, but the actual physical presence might not be reflected as much.
SO: That’s quite difficult, because people are buying digital and physical music much less, so it’s all about the live experience. I know you’re a very strong, visual live band, so how do you square that circle to convert that international audience to build a traditional fan base like live bands do?
YO: That’s the challenge, the other thing that’s happening is that there are showcase events and things that you can apply to online. So for instance we’ve just applied to South By South West. You’ve got different companies who make these opportunities available. So before you may have seen something in the back of a magazine, they’re approaching people online.
SO: What do you think are the key challenges as an independent artist you face in using digital distribution to reach an audience and monetize that, as a band?
YO: The challenges that our band faces are really getting noticed above all the noise out there. There’s so many people on there, everybody has the same idea. Another thing is, as you’ve said, it’s quite labour intensive this stuff, so fatigue is a major part of it. But I think that was always the case to a certain degree. People say you can get to people but you have to do a lot of work, it’s not just like it’s open to you. And again, if you look at something like MySpace, you’ve got major artists – obviously they’ve paid for whatever – and they’re being heavily promoted on that site. It’s kind of difficult, you’re back in the same situation. But at the same time, having said this, I have made international contacts because of the MySpace.
SO: What sort of contacts, how has that led to a working relationship?
YO: Bands. There was an artist called Tamar Kali, who was part of a thing called the Afro Punk movement, a kind of banner in New York and LA, she saw us on MySpace and she was coming to play here so she asked us to support her. This would never have happened without this stuff.
SO: Because you would never have heard of her because she was established in her own territory but not here?
YO: And vice versa. So it allows you to do that. So subsequently I’ve been over there twice, I’m making links. I’ve got lots of gigs even in the UK through it. I’ve got approached for gigs through MySpace.
SO: Do you find you’re collaborating with other promoters, musicians, visual artists, film-makers, even in your own town – in London – through digital communications, in a way you may not have done in previous generations when it was based around who you knew and who you would meet?
YO: Yes and no. The thing is, it’s like a blog when you get comments and people write outlandish, crazy things that they would never say in real life, and it’s a little bit like that with this as well sometimes. You might get a lot of interest, you might talk to a lot of people online, but how serious there are? I think when you have to see someone face-to-face, you have to be a little bit more about what you’re about, if you know what I mean, whereas you could be anybody behind the screen.
SO: So you could hide behind the anonymity of the internet, whereas actually to see a band live and talk to them and see their work is a much better way of establishing a relationship?
YO: Definitely, you mentioned collaborators, in terms of actually getting to work with good people, sometime there’s a difficulty with that, as people can put themselves over as being something they’re not quite. Or they might feel a little bit more brave when they contact you but when it comes to actually doing it, it can be a little bit more difficult for some people. It gives you the opportunity of having a voice but you have to back it up, basically.
SO: What kind of activities have you done so far to promote your EPs and records using digital tools?
YO: I have a mailing list, I’m always setting people up on that. I do use Facebook quite a lot so people know what’s going on.
SO: Is that to communicate with people you already know, because Facebook’s quite a personal medium?
YO: Yes it is, but once again that’s the difference between MySpace and Facebook. On Facebook, people are more likely to really know each other if you’re a friend, whereas MySpace a friend just means they like what you’re doing, they don’t have to know you at all. Hopefully what I’m trying to do is use the two together, because then you can ferry people from one side to the other side. Also with Facebook, because people do know each other, it’s a little bit closer, if you’re trying to sell something you’re going to find out more likely if you’re going to. Hopefully, but it really depends. It’s not an exact science.
SO: I’ve heard an expression lately talking about the first 100 passionate users, if you’re a commercial agency and you want to see something, you need to reach those people who are connected and influential. It’s like the kid in the playground who everyone wants to get to know. Have you felt that when you’ve been promoting there are key people or super-fans who help you do the heavy lifting work?
YO: Yes, that’s something I probably could get more into, I need a few more super fans, that’s another thing I have been using the internet recently for which is to try and get people who are super fans or street team members. I’ve advertised for that through another site, Gumtree, I use a bit. You can put your events up, but also to get people who might want to do some of this promotion.
SO: What sort of incentives would your offer – commission on sale or just the thrill of being involved in the band?
YO: Closer to the second, but it would be things like they’d get CDs, gig entry, merchandise they’d get free. How you would usually incentivise any street member because if you were going to pay anybody, you’re not really going to have anything to work with. But they should do it because they like the music, that’s kind of important.
SO: Do you feel building a personality and digital identity is quite important to connect with fans, for example blogs, Twitter, video diaries?
YO: Well it’s funny you mention that Susi, because I’m moving into the blog era. It’s interesting – there’s certain blogs I look at frequently, and there’s thing I like and there’s things I really don’t like. It’s good to create content, interesting content – but it has to be interesting. The thing with me, because I’m about to delve into that field, I want to do something different to what’s out there.
SO: What artists do you admire who are doing specific things in the digital space that you’d like to either use as an influence or replicate?
YO: There’s two major artists I find quite interesting how they’ve approached it. One is a rapper, 50 Cent, another is a rock band, Metallica. Now Metallica, they had a lot of controversy with the internet from its inception, with Napster and things, but they have this service where you can download their live shows. The funny thing is they actually charge for the majority of them, and people still download them. They occasionally have a monthly free show, but only for a certain amount of time then they charge. The thing is, this isn’t new music, this is just concert music and people still buy it – I’ve bought stuff. It speaks back to what you were saying about building a relationship and a personality online, with that particularly kind of music it is very much about the live thing and if you can’t see them you can almost get the feeling of being there from getting this live recordings.
On the other side, with 50 Cent, what he’s done, he’s built more of a community thing. The site isn’t really just about him. It is him, but he has any artist on there – stuff that’s going on right now in that field. He’s got other bloggers on there as well talking about it. He’s got the latest viral videos going up, there’s a lot of gossip on there because of the genre. Nowadays he lives in that kind of space.
For instance there’s another blog, Nah Right, which if you go to, you could go to either and get the same thing, but one is run by an artist but it’s not the artist’s website, it still promotes things by the artist and on his label, but it’s more like a general blog. If you want to find out what’s happening in the world of hip-hop, you could just go to thisis50.com.
SO: So in a way he becomes a destination portal, it’s a world bigger than him, which raises his profile as an artist?
YO: Exactly, very smart.
SO: Also lateral connections like someone who isn’t into his music but may be into an artist he’s talking about. He may even have his own label or imprint where he’s making income out of these artists.
YO: I think he is, what’s good about him, or what he’s done, every new artist goes through there, it’s one of the places they’ve got to stop off. Just like you might stop off at T4 or whatever, you stop off at Thisis50.com when you’ve got new stuff coming out. And I’m sure the companies pay a certain amount to be featured, so he has got income stream from that. And when you go on you’ll see all his mix-tapes of his artists, so you can’t escape that it’s his, but what’s happening there is not just what he’s doing. So the next thing I’m working on, because we’re a very live band, is trying to produce some content around that. I’ve also started co-hosting with Art Terry a series called Is Black Music on Resonance FM.
It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, which is to promote a scene – obviously including myself but not just myself – I’m thinking about as a next step as well. There are bands doing similar types of things. One thing people have to remember is that that’s how you get a genre, you have a scene then it builds with press and media, then they say ‘this is this’, then they get an interest. Sometimes it’s hard to do this as an individual artist or band.
SO: This comes back to collaborators, how you connect better with people. Do you think that necessarily has to be in a physical space? Do you think regionality of specific cities like being in London is important? Do you think digital technologies let us create scenes across who countries, regions or continents?
YO: I think it’s a nice idea, I think it will to a degree, but this is the thing that we’re all a little bit challenged by at the moment to see where it ends up. There is this digital community that you can create but the physiciality is still extremely important, it’s making sure you translate that. I think if you have an entirely online presence, it may be harder to connect with people. That’s one thing I’m also trying to work out, how to keep it street level and then connect to the web. To be honest, the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve noticed from the beginning, an artist that’s popular in the ‘real world’, is always going to be popular online.
SO: Do you think things like The Arctic Monkeys success is about a band that are good because they’re good, not because they used a platform like MySpace to achieve it?
YO: Absolutely, but The Arctic Monkey’s thing, there’s a lot of scepticism, I think it was made more of than what it really was. They didn’t come from the internet, but they did use the internet – or their people used the internet – very well.
SO: They already had a record deal when the MySpace phenomenon kicked off so in a way it became a PR story. We talked about some very major established artists there like 50 Cent and Metallica, how easy do you think it is as a relatively unknown, grassroots artist to actually gain profile in this space and build it?
YO: I think it’s pretty difficult to be honest. The thing is, you need a team, you always need a team, and collaborators because as an artist, as an independent artist, you’ve got certain challenges going on that you don’t necessarily have as a regular artist. Because you actually have to be the business mind and the artist, and the two aren’t always the best of friends. If you’re really good on the business and internet side and communicating and contacting people, it can sometimes take away from the artistic side.
SO: Do you mean this in time as well as skills? Is this a unique challenge in the digital age or to a certain extent, have business savvy artists always been more successful? Is it more polarised now that marketing and PR savvy people find it easier to build an audience than just purely creative people?
YO: I think to be honest, yes, if you are PR and business savvy, you could create something that isn’t necessarily that creative and be successful at it. Whereas if you’re really creative and you’re not business savvy, you still might be a little bit lost. But at the same time, there’s a case of as the more things change, the more things stay the same. Although the models are changing, you essentially need tastemakers. You still need someone you go to as an artist who says ‘that’s great’ then they spread and proliferate that.
SO: But in the old days that would have been A&R and the print press like NME, Rolling Stone, what is that now those traditional building-blocks like radio are starting to fragment into a million pieces?
YO: I’ve looked at certain blogs, I see who they promote. What’s interesting to me, artists who are already established before all this kicked off, I’d say established say five years ago, when it comes to them working the internet, it’s an unfair thing to really judge it by that, because they’re probably internet savvy but even if they aren’t, people have already bought into their brand.
And they have companies, management and structure around them. As an independent artist, you are your own manager and marketer! Which makes things much, much more difficult, because on the one hand you could come up with something really great to market but then you actually have to get it done and there are man hours involved. It’s very schizophrenic, our multiple personalities.
There are times when I literally don’t think about the creative part of it. It’s like I have to do the creative part, and get that done, then I have to do the business part. I’ve got to be at least two or three different people. Which is now why I’m looking for a bit of help. The thing is, you need the best person for the job, always.
I think the thing with the internet phenomenon, the wholesales and revenues and where it’s all coming from and where’s it all going to come from. With some of these blogs and some of these artists who are recommended, that’s great they’ve got a presence and people like them but what are they actually selling? The established artists are selling but a lot of the new artists aren’t selling. They’re very cool, but they’re not selling. So you need somebody who can actually translate that into the sales side of things, that’s why you have to have that on-the-ground presence.
Which is why one of the things I’m doing is linking with other bands, I’m considering putting on some nights early next year with other people I know. I’ve never been a luddite, I believe in using the best of whatever. The album, for instance, recording on tape but mixed and edited digitally. I’m all for that. It’s the same with this, the internet is really good for getting a lot of people across the world but if you don’t have that real world thing happening you might be able to put a video on YouTube that’s a bit wacky but then people forget about it the next day.
SO: You were mentioning that sometimes it can be quite manual trying to attract an audience, like through MySpace. Do you think there is a particular digital tool that could be really useful for musicians to reach people? Or is Last.fm starting to do that through scrobbing and tagging?
YO: Well, I use Last.fm as well, I got on that recently, I need to delve into it more. I did a little promotional thing on there as well, I wasn’t blown away by the results, but that could just be because I haven’t used it a lot. When I first started using MySpace there was a tool – maybe I should say this, maybe I shouldn’t say this – there was a few tools out there you could use that would do it for you.
SO: Like Badder Adder.
YO: Yes that was bad! That was great!
SO: But really spamming people, does that help you engage or not?
YO: You see, what’s the difference, what makes it spamming? Is it about the amount you can do or what you’re doing with it? I view spam as something that’s not targeted, you might never want to be targeted and that’s fine.
SO: TV advertising is not particularly targeted a lot of the time, or posters.
YO: Exactly, so what is spam. Some people feel like it’s personal when it comes. My thing is if I contact somebody who appears to like music that I make, I don’t see what the problem is with that. And to be honest, neither does MySpace. It’s like they say, you kill one man you’re a murderer, you kill many you’re a conqueror, kill them all you’re a god. If I’m Beyonce or Jay-Z or whoever – I say Beyonce because I see her ads all over the place, I get bombarded by her, I’m looking at The Killers thing right now. But because I’m an independent artist, all of a sudden it’s spamming.
SO: So it’s like you’re saying there’s a hierarchy between the old music industry and the new artists. Do you think we’ve really moved on? Last.fm and MySpace have really major investors and corporation like Rupert Murdoch, so one corporation is being replaced by another who are the gatekeepers to the audience?
YO: As I say, the more things change, the more things stay the same. We’ve moved on to a degree but what’s happened is destroyed and rebuilding. I think a lot of this stuff happened even before then internet and that you could download stuff for free really came in. You just had a lot of crap artists, and when I say crap I really do mean crap. They’re not even necessarily artists. I think a lot of artists now – you talked about a hybrid manager but there are hybrid artists. It’s not just the internet, it’s TV as well, we’ve these programmes where you can go and try and do something. Immediacy allows people to have a go. There’s a lot of having a go now, whereas I’m going to put it on the line – I still think you’ve got to be a little bit pretentious, a little bit arrogant, a little bit of an inflated ego to believe you are an artist with something to say, and you really need to say it and people really need to hear it.
SO: You need an audience, otherwise why are you doing it.
YO: Exactly, you really want to communicate this thing. Whereas what I think you have now a lot of is that people can throw a pose, throw a shape – anybody can do that. And that’s a lot of what you’re getting now. You’re getting a lot of the stream clogged up with that. More so that before, this is not to me like pop music and specialist music, this is more like karaoke.
SO: How do you feel about bit-torrenting. Do you feel that home-taping is killing music?
YO: Ha! Well once again, this goes back to the start. Yes and no is the best answer.
SO: Have you seen any benefit from file sharing for you as an unknown artist? There are some theories that you have to get a lot of people downloading your stuff as an unknown artist before you get one sale, maybe it’s a ratio of 20 to 1, they have to know about you before they’ll pay, or are they going to pay?
YO: Well this is the funny thing, I don’t have all the answers obviously but this is my hunch from what I’ve experienced – I think that there’s definitely a certain level you have to reach, it’s like anything, that’s why you have to stay on it. If someone sees that you’ve got 200 or 300 plays – which is a lot for an independent artists but not a lot for a major artists – they’ll say people actually like you. Then other people will come, and you’ll see that happen continuously. Then some person might buy the thing. But I think I’ve had as much sales when stuff has been in a magazine. Because I can remember times when a magazine came out then the next couple of weeks a spike. But I still think the real world is the real world. We all live in the real world, even if we hide behind a computer sometimes.
SO: So the taste-makers in the traditional magazines are probably more influential for commerce, not necessarily icons, but for making a hard sale rather than ‘hey that was cool’ or ‘thanks for adding me as a friend’.
YO: Exactly, I think what you might get more from online is shows, we’ve got a lot of shows from stuff, or if you’ve got a lot of people coming through an artist might get paid more by sponsorship and going on tours because they’re getting a lot of traffic, that’s why you need to get a lot of traffic. But in terms of actual direct sales? It’s hard, because if I can get something for free and I really don’t know you, I’m just going to get it for free. That’s where the personality thing, bringing that in.
SO: Do you think there’s a lot of propaganda, because I met a lot of people in recent days who aren’t musicians but are music fans, and they say things like ‘it doesn’t really matter because the cost of music production is really cheap, anyone can do it in their bedroom’. Then I explain that only certain types of music you can do in your bedroom, the rest of us have got to have cars and studios and vans and rehearsal rooms, and it costs a bit less than it did 10 years ago but not much less. So there’s almost a propaganda amongst consumers that ‘ah it doesn’t cost anything to produce’.
YO: It’s very interesting because I haven’t really thought of that, but I think that could very well be true. I have a live band now but I’ve produced electronic music, I still do. The equipment I have to produce it isn’t cheap. It’s very interesting what you’ve said, people are definitely getting the feeling that it’s easy to do. That kind of reflects in the respect – or the lack of respect – they have for the artist. But I think you’ve just go to engage people, one way or another, and that’s really the key, whether you’re online or offline. I heard something really interesting the other day which is Kid Rock, he isn’t on iTunes and he’s double platinum. He refused to put stuff on iTunes.
SO: And that’s to do with the culture now that de-bundling the album, the major labels argue instead of getting £12 for a CD, they may just download 2 tracks for £1.60 on iTunes so the actual business model, which is great from a consumer point of view, they spent less and just get what they want, but from an industry perspective – the business model is screwed.
YO: I think for the companies, this is what they’ve got to realise and this is what’s hard for them, I think there was a good 10, 20 years – I don’t know how long – when they made it into baked beans. They made something that’s kind of magical and intangible into baked beans. And then people started realising, we’ve got all these E numbers in the baked beans, there’s maybe one nice baked bean in there – and they don’t want to buy it!
SO: They all taste the same.
YO: Exactly, so the irony of the whole situation to me, is that if you actually concentrate on trying to create good product, as they would say, or good music as I would say, then you’ll actually get the sales. This is a major thing but nobody ever talks about it. There is something about conveying real emotion in music that makes people want to listen to music. People forget that – when I say people I mean industry people – forget that music actually does something to people. I think they think it’s all about the fashion and fads and the trends and how people look now, what’s happening at that second. It’s all moving so fast, but to be honest, people still like a ballad or what puts them in a certain place emotionally and they don’t get enough of that.
And they also like people who are the real deal. They can buy into them. I think this whole buying into things – I said that because it’s the parlance, I never bought into an artist in my life. I bought a lot of stuff by the same artist but I never bought into the artist. I saw artists that said something to me that I could relate to, maybe helped me get through the day, maybe made me want to jump up, maybe if I felt sad I could relate to what they were talking about. Because I actually got something from the artists because they were saying their emotions through the music. But now what you’ve got, maybe it should be called the music drama industry, because you’ve got a lot of acting going on. People playing roles as oppose to actually being them.
I remember seeing something about six months ago on UK Gold TV, they had these old actors – Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, an old Parkinson interview. It kind of reminded me of the notorious Sex Pistols thing, things were different then they were drinking, they were smoking. And they were both drunk – proper, ratted drunk – but that’s who they were! The media and the industry have to deal with them. Now they’ve sanitised everything. If you’re a bit rough – even someone like Tracey Emin – that’s how these people are! But they don’t want it, because that might upset this, and that might upset that. So they take all the fun out of it, the excitement. So how could you so-called buy into an artist, because you don’t know nothing about the person. Ok they do all this reality show, that’s not what I’m talking about. Not a staged thing. You get a vibe. You get a vibe from people. If you don’t have people who have vibes, what do you expect?
SO: I’ve had a great chat with you Yinka – I don’t think we’ve got any of the solutions but we’re asking the right questions. The important thing is let’s keep talking about let’s keep connecting. The more artists who explore the digital space, the more answers we’ll build up in our own community.
YO: Definitely and you’ve made me think, which is a good thing, I like thinking.
SO: And what should people buy from you?
They should buy Emperors New Clothes, three each if you can.
Where from?
www.sabatta.net, www.myspace.com/sabatta or iTunes or Amazon or CD Baby – they’re cool.
Online Music Economy research index
