Not my normal bit of news but keep reading...long story short, Los Angeles indie bands, get thee to Echoplex to begin world domination (or for getting licensing royalities at the very least).
JOSH SCHWARTZ has always wanted to make a television show about the music business. Even before he created “The OC,” Mr. Schwartz — who spent a good bit of his 20s hanging out at Los Angeles rock clubs — wrote a pilot called “Wall to Wall Records,” about the young employees of a record label.
So you’d think that when the writers’ strike of late 2007 and early 2008 halted production on Mr. Schwartz’s latest series, “Gossip Girl” and “Chuck,” he would have jumped at Warner Brothers Television’s offer to make “Wall to Wall Records” for the company’s Web venture, TheWB.com. But his enthusiasm for the project had wilted. “The music business has so fundamentally changed that doing something about a record label feels eight or nine years late,” he said.
Record companies have faltered in the face of the digital music revolution, their profits decimated and CD sales down by almost 50 percent from what they were at the turn of the century. “That whole universe has morphed into something new and more sad,” Mr. Schwartz said.
He couldn’t get the idea of a music show out of his head, though. He countered the Warner Brothers proposal with a happier premise, one that, at 32, he “was starting to feel a little disconnected from”: 20-somethings who hang out at a Los Angeles rock club.
“What if it’s about the kids who go to the clubs, the fans of the music, instead?” he said. “That world hasn’t changed at all.”
Music isn’t the only part of the entertainment business that has changed, and not for the better. The double whammy of the 100-day writers’ strike and online competition has left even hit shows on the broadcast networks well below their pre-strike ratings. With both networks and musical acts scrambling to connect with audiences, a music-oriented TV series available on iTunes and TheWB.com, with links to bands’ MySpace pages — and with Mr. Schwartz and his longtime music supervisor, Alex Patsavas (the tastemaker of her own label, Chop Shop Records), as executive producers — could be the kind of venture that heralds a new era in online TV.
Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Patsavas’s series, “Rockville, CA,” makes its debut on Tuesday with the first four of its five- to seven-minute episodes. Set in the fictitious Club Rockville in Los Angeles — the name is a homage to the 1984 R.E.M. song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” — the 20-episode season follows Hunter (Andrew J. West), an archetype familiar to devotees of Mr. Schwartz’s series: he’s the dark-haired, hyperarticulate, self-deprecating, self-professed nerd, like Seth Cohen of “The OC,” Dan Humphrey of “Gossip Girl” and Chuck of, uh, “Chuck.”
In this case he’s a music blogger with a crush on Deb (Alexandra Chando from “As the World Turns”), an A&R rep for Wall to Wall Records. Deb, whose primary trait is her obsessive use of the word “major” (as in “that band is major”), comes to the club to see and sign her favorite acts.
Those acts — a diverse mix of established (the indie rock band Eagles of Death Metal), up-and-coming (the synth-pop singer-songwriter Lights), foreign (the Swedish singer Lykke Li) and local artists (the power-pop group the Broken West) — are as essential to “Rockville” as Hunter and Deb’s budding romance. Each episode was shot at the Echoplex, a real rock club in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and takes place in one night, with a single band playing in the background. The show’s home page on TheWB.com features interviews with those bands and exclusive live performances of two of each band’s songs.
“It’s how people find music now,” Ms. Patsavas explained. “They don’t go to their record store anymore.”
Record stores aren’t the only things becoming obsolete; the concept of “selling out” has gone by the wayside too, as bands now jump at any opportunity for exposure. Commercials, TV shows and ring tones are fair game and more than fairly profitable. Apple commercials have helped account for the rapid rise of both Feist, whose “1,2,3,4” appeared in an iPod Nano ad, and Yael Naim, whose “New Soul” became a hit after being featured in a campaign for the MacBook Air.
The lure of licensing is not lost even on the legends. Last year Bob Dylan lent a new tune to an iPod commercial; a 2006 episode of CBS’s “Cold Case” featured eight Bruce Springsteen songs.
“Five to eight years ago it definitely would have been frowned upon, but then there were more record sales,” said Ian Moreno, a guitarist for the Little Ones, a Los Angeles indie-pop outfit signed to Ms. Patsavas’s Chop Shop Records and performing in the seventh episode of “Rockville.” “Now it’s become the norm. It gives bands credibility.”
If “Rockville” has anything going for it, it’s credibility, which Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Patsavas earned by bringing underground bands to the mainstream. Death Cab for Cutie broke wide by performing on “The OC.”
In the past two years their collaboration on “Gossip Girl” has fueled the success of acts like Vampire Weekend and the Kills. And the Fray’s “How to Save a Life” and Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” attained Top 10 status when Ms. Patsavas licensed the songs to be played over climactic scenes on “Grey’s Anatomy.”
“Bands trust her,” Mr. Schwartz said. And the industry respects her: Wired magazine named Ms. Patsavas “the hottest talent scout in the business.” (Most recently she was responsible for the chart-topping soundtrack to “Twilight,” last fall’s hit teenage-vampire film.)
Warner Brothers is hoping the duo can grab the attention of the coveted female 18-to-34 demographic in particular. The studio allowed them a creative freedom not typically given to producers at the network level.
“They said, ‘Here’s what your budget is, here’s how many episodes we’d like,’ ” Mr. Schwartz said. “I gave them a rough shape of what the show would be, and then we got to go discover it, cast who we wanted to cast and write the scripts without notes.”
The bite-size episodes presented Mr. Schwartz with a new challenge. “It’s not like you’re doing an hourlong soap where people are dying,” he said. “It’s smaller. Part of the excitement of doing it was figuring out how to tell stories in this format. It’s less incident-driven and more observational.”
Lisa Gregorian, executive vice president for worldwide marketing at the Warner Brothers Television Group, noted, “Short-form is original to the Web, and for today’s digital production we can’t justify producing original long-form at this time” financially.
There’s no expectation that the series will migrate to television. The real growth potential lies in the supplementary content and sponsor tie-ins, even though Warner Brothers says it gets no cut from the sales of the artists it is in essence promoting.
“There are all these opportunities online with marketing, and all that appeals to the entrepreneurial side of me,” Mr. Schwartz said. In the end, he added, “if you don’t love the show and you don’t love the characters, all that other stuff doesn’t matter.”
Still, all that other stuff matters because that’s what’s going to determine whether the venture makes money — through ads on TheWB.com or episode sales on iTunes. But the pesky details of a viable business model remain elusive. Episodic series are being produced all over the Web, but none have gained much long-term traction.
TheWB.com is seeking to be an alternative to Hulu, the joint online video venture of NBC and Fox. TheWB.com showcases shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Veronica Mars” as well as a slate of Web-exclusive series.
But the company’s larger strategy is to use the Web to enhance TV viewing, not just replace it. To that end the creator of almost every network series is experimenting online, producing “brand extensions” to shows: blogs, back stories, even mini-episodes.
“We’re learning every single day,” Ms. Gregorian said. “The metric for success evolves as you go along.”
Mr. Schwartz agrees. He has a vivid idea of what’s happening to the old business model of television — the 30-second commercial — thanks to a multitasking younger generation that fast-forwards right through the ads.
“It’s collapsing,” he said. “You literally feel like you’re walking across the bridge, and behind you the bridge is blowing up, and you’re just like, ‘I’ve got to get to the other side and see what’s there’ before you get taken out.”
Cue the hard-driving indie-rock soundtrack as Mr. Schwartz leaps to the other side. (Source)
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