Number One With A Bullet | Local entrepreneurs try to make it in the topsy-turvy recording industry
Photo/Matthew L. Brown
BUSINESS HARMONY: Kim Jennings and Dan Cloutier founded Birch Beer Records to support and promote the local acoustic music scene.
In its early days, the record industry was about community, and music fans could hear the uniqueness of each community in the records they produced.
Fans knew when they were hearing a song recorded by legendary record companies like Stax or Chess. They knew if the track was recorded in major music cities like Muscle Shoals, Ala., Memphis, Tenn., or Detroit, the legendary hometown of Motown.
Geographically, those days have passed. Technology now allows musicians to record anytime, anywhere and to do it themselves.
But if Kim Jennings and Dan Cloutier have anything to say about it, the community aspect of the old-time recording industry is making a comeback with labels like the one they started in Worcester a little less than a year ago, Birch Beer Records.
Working Artists
Jennings and Cloutier both have regular, full-time jobs. Jennings works in IT and Cloutier, for an adult education organization.
Cloutier also runs a regular open mic at the Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham and has been playing folk music “very seriously” for the past six years or so. Jennings has always been a singer, but didn’t pick up a guitar until after college.
With a career and a family, “it’s tough to find creative space,” she said. But she found it at Cloutier’s open mic.
“When you figure out what you’re really passionate about, it makes it easy to start something,” Jennings said. And less than a year into running Birch Beer Records, they’re “much farther along than we thought we’d be,” she said.
At first, Jennings and Cloutier were concerned about whether they’d be good business partners. Now, they’re finding that Birch Beer Records may be in the right place at the right time. And the founders have deftly combined their passion for music with a keen business sense and a good feel for the future of the recording industry.
For starters, people are becoming more and more interested in local products, whether it’s food or merchandise or music. And Worcester is full of acoustic and roots music talent. What it lacks is a network for that talent, Jennings said.
It’s her and Cloutier’s hope that Birch Beer can act as the center of that network.
But that doesn’t mean Birch Beer is going to love you just because you’re from Central Massachusetts and have an acoustic guitar and some recording software.
“We want to see them live. That’s what a local music scene is. It’s so important. That’s how you connect with people. A great live performance is critical,” Jennings said.
That’s also how records are sold.
“A lot of creative people don’t have that business sense,” Cloutier said. “People who have a lot of success understand the importance of talking to people, and having a mailing list and being organized. Every door that they open up is a door that opens up for us.”
Every door that opens up reveals the kind of operational challenges that any small business has to deal with.
“Some of it is figuring out what is possible. What happens from an operational perspective?” Jennings said. “What happens when an artist is on the road? Do they want to sell CDs from the trunk of their car? Do we want to ship them?”
Giving Birch Beer the opportunity to have such operational concerns is the fact that the once mighty music industry monopolies erected by major recording labels is today on shaky ground.
Technology hasn’t just given fans the ability to download music for free or for very little, it has also given artists the ability to record and promote themselves without industry support.
Still, “the people who really succeed” outside of the record industry mainstream “do it together and really push it. They form a base, they get combined, they form communities and they get networked,” Cloutier said. He said he’s had the most success of his entire music career in the few months that Birch Beer has been open because musicians and fans are interested in that type of creative community.
Forming that community for Central Massachusetts and helping artists get networked, marketed and promoted is what Birch Beer is all about.
“We want to be profitable, and we want to be able to exist, but we have the artist in mind,” Jennings said.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments