Articles & Advice
Bud Scoppa: What is the basic set of requirements or prerequisites for any of you to seriously consider signing an act?
Geoffrey Weiss: The question I always ask myself is: Is there one thing this band does that is extraordinary? There has got to be something about the band that makes me go, "Oh my God, nobody else can do that!" I figure that if everything else about the band is okay, they'll get better. But there's got to be one thing about it that nobody else can do. That's my criterion. It can even be a chemistry. A great rock band can be four unexceptional musicians doing something extraordinary.
![[Jim Barber]](images/jimcolor.gif) Jim Barber: For me, it's more that when you look at this artist, it's not worth signing unless they do something for you — or for people — that nobody else can do for them. That's how you build a long-term career: as an artist, you provide something to your audience that no one else can provide. You have to be somebody's favorite band in the whole world.
Liz Brooks: A great song is a wonderful thing. In a lot of ways it's the backbone of everything. But a great artist who's real — who you want to work with on a long-term basis — that's a different set of criteria.
Matt Aberle: In an ideal world, you'd like to have both.
Brooks: You want a great artist who has 40 or 50 great songs. To define "real" is difficult, but if I hear one great song, or one great song and five songs that are developing into something, I want to feel that there is a source from which more of that is going to come, and a source from which artistic growth is going to come. Just a sense that — it doesn't necessarily have to be overwhelmingly commercial, although on the other hand it can be blatantly, ridiculously commercial — but it has to be real and true to what it is. If it's real and true to what it is, there will be people out there to whom it will speak. If I love it, there is going to be somebody out there who is going to love it too. Maybe it's 5,000 somebodies, or 50,000 somebodies, and maybe it's 5-million somebodies.
Weiss: We're being paid for our taste, and no one knows. The marketplace is always careening about, smashing into things. Guessing what is actually going to sell is a very dangerous game. Some things are valid for whatever speaks to us, and then you hope that the record and the market have some overlap. Sometimes great records fall through the cracks, and sometimes great records that you thought were going to flop sell 5-million copies. When we put out Green Day, we had modest expectations — everybody did. Everybody wanted them, but if you had said to me that we were going to sell a quarter of a million records, I would have said, "Fantastic!" The band told me that they would have been happy selling half a million records. They had a base of 40,000, and I thought we could get them to well beyond that.
Brooks: But at that time, a goal of half a million records must have seemed pretty lofty.
 Weiss: Yeah, I was looking at them, like, these guys are pretty ambitious. I didn't want to give them a lecture about the record business and tell them that's not going to happen.
Brooks: It's a crap-shoot. That's why you go for what's real, instead of what is of the moment. You can't chase trends. My company is really, really tight-knit, and I do tend to have conversations with my promotion people and with my marketing people before I sign an artist. That's primarily me wanting my staff to be involved beforehand, because when the record comes out I want their hearts and I want their souls.
Scoppa: That's in-house politicking.
Brooks: It's in-house politicking, but I do take their tastes into account. If they have a strong opinion about a band that I'm looking at, I'm going to listen to it. I'm not going to base my A&R decisions on what my promotion people think, but I'm certainly going to listen to them. We do have PDs calling us up going, "Find me a band that's going to write another 'Plowed.'" I can't go looking for that. You'll fail. I think a lot of people let themselves be dragged around by the marketplace, as opposed to being willing to stand out front with any kind of artistic vision.
Scoppa: Where do you look to find new bands?
Weiss: For me, the most important thing by far is having a network of people I trust. It's people in bands, it's producers, it's people in record stores, it's booking agents. It's just talking to people you really respect, and finding out who they're seeing and what they're liking. I think listening to unsolicited material is probably the biggest waste of time in the record business. I've listened to tens of thousands of unsolicited tapes in my life, and I've never signed a band off one. I know there are people who have, and there are even people who have signed good bands off of them. I think part of the problem is that the kind of people that are sending their unsolicited tapes to Warner Bros. are probably mostly not the kind of people I want to sign. But it's fanzines. The most important thing, though, is just talking to people who are big fans in local communities around the world. I have friends who work in record stores or book clubs in 50 different cities who I just call up and I talk to. When I'm in town, I take them out and talk to them and see what's going on where they live.
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