Pavilion Entertainment is giving away a $10,000 marketing and branding package to one lucky Sonicbids artist.
We sat down with Dez Dickerson, Pavilion Entertainment’s CEO, to chat about his career, starting his own company, and its social branding package. Dez has been in the music industry for over 44 years as an entrepreneur, artist, musician, producer, songwriter, record executive, label owner, artist manager, author, and spent 5 years as the original guitarist with Prince and The Revolution.
Here is what Dez had to say about the industry, branding as a band, and his feelings on Prince tweeting:
How did Pavilion Entertainment come to be?
Originally, Pavilion started as an indie label in the mid 90s. The idea was to create a record label that thought like a marketing company that thought like a management company. One of the things that end up creating dysfunction in spite of the people’s level of talent is too much soloing and stratification with in the business. You got a management company over here, a record label over there, a booking agency over here, and when things are going well everyone wants to take credit, when things are going badly everybody is pointing fingers and assigns the blame. So the idea was to create a core synergy and try to simplify the objectives and streamline the process.
How do you gauge if an artist is successful or not?
In that process we came upon the mantra “audience is the only metric that matters.” One thing in common with every effort to break a band or record is audience engagement and retention. If you have an audience, you have a career. A record deal is a contractual agreement that may or may not help you build an audience. If a band has one hit, they had an experience, not a career.
Pavilion Synergy is offering a social marketing/branding package through Sonicbids. One thing you mention in the description is the evaluation of a band’s current social presence. What are some things you look at when you are evaluating a band’s social presence?
The first thing we are looking to do is map the present social audience, in addition of having first mapping the DNA of the artists or the bands themselves. So many times there is dissonance between what a band or an artist believes they are versus how they are actually being preserved as in the market place. From there we look at the number of fans, although this is more than just the metrics. It is a matter of taking that data and diving deeper in determining what the actually level of quality engagement.
Have you ever had any challenges working with a band that is apprehensive about using social media, or that doesn't see the real life purpose in marketing themselves?
People have these flawed ways of thinking. Especially with an artist, they think that if people just hear their music, than it is all going to happen. The reality is that being good is not good enough. People have to understand that if there is not some purpose that separates you from the other five hundred thousands other bands, you will have to be very skillful in having a distilled and focused value proposition as a band. This is where we start. The problems you are having as a band in terms of growing an audience probably have nothing to do with how good you are; it has everything to do with how you think.
One of your old buddies (Prince) just signed up for twitter, and took the world by storm. How do you think he is doing?
In his case, he is an example that I have used for years about audience segmentation and being true to a very detailed DNA map of your own brand. In his case the very core element of who he is, is mystery. The thing I have said for years, this is one artist rather then having this boilerplate mantra that people have clung onto, “oh you should tweet a certain number of times a day”, he is an artist that should never tweet. He is an artist that shouldn’t even have a smart phone because his value proposition is mystery.
