Tweet This
Making a living as a musician may be especially difficult in these times of record label consolidation, sales collapse, and streaming services, but it has never been easy. The people who perform and record music add immensely to the culture of their area, but rarely are remunerated in a way that reflects their contributions. But two men in Austin, TX are trying to change that by bringing a symphony-style patronage model to local popular music.
Matt Ott and Colin Kendrick are the co-founders of Black Fret, an organization whose mission is "to empower musicians to create and perform great new music." They have a patronage model, where members of the organization pony up $1,500, and in turn have a say in awarding substantial grants to their favorite local musicians. The group gave out $150,000 in grants last year, and is looking to pass out even more this December at their annual gala event called The Black Ball.
I called up Ott and Kendrick to get the details on their organization and how they think it could change lives not only in Austin, but for musicians around the country. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Colin Kendrick: Matt and I have been friends since we were 14-years-old. We grew up in Austin surrounded by the music industry here in town. Lots of our friends played music out in the clubs. We had no talent at all, but we had an incredible passion for the music scene here in Austin and watched firsthand what it did to our friends – successes and failures, heartbreaks, joyrides.
Having been here all our lives, we’re very in touch with what’s happened to the music industry in the last 20 years. I finished my undergrad in audio engineering. I worked for the television show Austin City Limits, which is where I began to think about creating something like a symphony or an opera but popular. Matt and I went on to with another pal of ours to found the Austin Music Foundation, which is a charity that provides business and educational mentoring to local bands here in town. Black Fret is an evolution of that. We realized after providing education and mentoring to bands that we have an upper echelon of artistic excellence that even with those skills, those people needed financial support — seed capital, as it were.
Matt Ott: I have lived in Austin, Texas since 1978. Not only do we have great passion for music, but great passion for what music is doing for our city. People often make the observation that coming to Austin and not enjoying the live music is like going to New York and not enjoying the beer, or going to California and not drinking the wine. It’s part of who were are. Keeping music here as a truly vibrant concern is near and dear to my heart.
Setaro: Can you explain how Black Fret works?
Ott: The model behind Black Fret is simple. We are a member-based model where our members join, and by virtue of joining, they become a patron of local music. They gain the privilege to nominate the bands that they love, attend a multitude of events every year – this year, we’ve had over 30 – vote for who will receive a minor or major grant, and then celebrate the rewarding of those grants at the gala event that we hold each winter. We have delivered $250,000 in grants in our first two years of grant-giving, and we’ll be giving another over $200,000 this year.
Kendrick: Once a band is nominated, they get to avail themselves of our advisory board, which is a group of over 40 music industry professionals in Austin, from engineers, producers, booking agents, entertainment lawyers, music licensing experts, etc., so that they have access to the music industry professionals that can help move their career forward.
Once they receive a grant, they still have access to all those advisers, but now have the ability to unlock the grant that they’ve been awarded by creating new music, performing their music outside Austin, or by performing community service. That is to say, for example, they can perform for another nonprofit in town and unlock upwards of $1,000 as a grant.
This gives us incredible access into the creative process: how much new music is being created, how much community service is being performed. They’re given their grant dollars, and then they report back to us what they use those grant dollars for, be it recording an album or tour support or paying their electric bill. What they do with those grant dollars once they unlock them and they’re in their pockets is up to them.
Setaro: So the accountability happens beforehand rather than afterwards?
Kendrick: Exactly.
Ott: We wanted a control that prevented us from distributing money to a band that was going to break up, having been through that with the Austin Music Foundation. We come from a place of smart philanthropy, and having performance-based metrics establishes our credibility.
We’re able to tell you exactly how many new songs we’ve funded, how many new songs went into the recording studio, how many people distributed their own albums, how many tour dates were done in the U.S. and internationally, how many charity performances were performed by our artists. We’ve had 40-plus concerts for other charities. We paid the bands to perform at those charity events.
Setaro: You guys set the price point for membership at $1,500. What made you set that price?
Ott: The $1,500 price point was arrived at in a number of different ways. We wanted this to be an egalitarian organization, not one where one patron of local music pays $10,000 and someone else pays is paying $50, and there’s different levels of recognition between them. We thought it was important that if you want to support local music via Black Fret, that everyone’s equal. Whether you make $3 million a year or $30,000 a year, you can be an equal patron. So we looked for a price point that could fit in that level. We really look at it from two perspectives – a matter of material impact to the artist, as well as value to the patron.
So at $1,500 a year with a hundred members, after paying for the events and paying for the musicians to play at the events and so on, that gave us $100,000 to award to our musicians, which we felt was the first big stake in the ground that we really wanted to place to establish some credibility.
Kendrick: I worked in wealth management for Price Waterhouse in Dallas after my graduate degree. A lot of people have had the experience of donating thousands of dollars to a charity, going to the annual fundraiser, and finding yourself in the back row because somebody else donated one percent of a trust fund they inherited. We wanted to break down those traditional income disparity barriers and to create a community, and that’s what we’ve done.
People come to our events and say that people are hugging each other more than they’ve ever seen before. At the end of the day, it works because it’s people who really care about music. They can earn $40,000 a year and afford to be a member. They can earn a million dollars a year and afford to be a member. So part of that is finding people who will take the time and energy to actually get involved.
Setaro: How did you recruit the initial membership base for Black Fret?
Ott: Initially it was our friends, obviously.
Kendrick: We have a fair amount of friends [laughs]. In fact, we had a deliberate strategy to keep kind of quiet about launching Black Fret. We didn’t want to make a big splash and say we were going to do all these great things without having the money to back it up. So we kept it quiet until we reached 75 members or so, and then began to go to the press a little bit. Within a year, we reached our first hundred members. That’s when we decided to announce our first crop of nominees, and announce the fact that we were going to give away $100,000 that December, nine months later.
Setaro: Do you have a cap on membership?
Kendrick: We do. The model we’ve developed we call “limited equitable patronage.” A limited number of members contributing equally to become patrons of the arts. Frankly, we think it’s a pretty scalable model for a lot of different projects.
Ott: We’ve stated that we have a cap of 1,333 members. And 1,333 members at $1,500 a year is $500 short of $2 million. That allows us to not only give direct grants to musicians, but also create an endowment to fund future grants and really become an institution.
Setaro: Can you talk about taking this model out to other cities?
Ott: Our plan is to take it to the other ten major music cities in North America in the next few years.
Kendrick: If we get 1,300 people [per city], you’re talking about 13,000 die-hard music fans nationwide. We’d be allocating $20 million a year in grants.
Our vision is, you can fund 50 of your favorite artists that year, 500 in total, and then have the ability to tour those artists in those cities, allowing them to gain access to larger crowds, getting them airplanes, hotels, and valuable access to the advisers in each of those markets. In fact, what we believe we’re doing is creating a minor league of music. The idea is to try and change the economics of the music industry. The risk/return profile of a label is terrible. It’s where the seven-album contract came from. A record label had to have that kind of insurance of recovery if the band actually hit. So we’re trying to come at the roots of that.
Ott: The analogy of calling it the minor league of local music is something I really love, because we deliberately created the model to allow musicians to unlock grant dollars by performing outside of their home market. So if you’re a Black Fret artist and you received a grant in Austin, if you go play the Black Fret venues along the east coast, you go to Nashville, Memphis, D.C., New York, Boston, what have you, you’re going to be paid out of your grant to do that. It effectively is tour support that labels used to do for a select number of bands. But even back in the day at labels, it wasn’t a common thing.
Of course, Black Fret always pays their artists to play. So if you’re going to one of those cities and you’re playing a Black Fret show there, you’re going to be paid by that local Black Fret chapter for the show. On top of that, if you book a public show with other Black Fret artists, specifically aligning yourselves with the best artists in town, you will grow your fanbase that much more quickly and reach that critical mass so that you begin to get the attention of the festival tours and so on.
Kendrick: It’s an ambitious solution. We’ve been working on this concept for 15 years. Not to toot our own horns, but I feel like we’ve really figured it out. It’s growing at an impressive pace. We only need 13,000 members nationwide, and we’ve got three percent of that already.
There’s a lot of work to be done to figure out how to bring it to each city – what the membership caps are, what the dues are – but the point is, I don’t think it’s going to be all that hard to find 13,000 people that are willing spend $100 a month to have an incredibly rich musical life. Hell, I used to drop that on CDs when I was scooping ice cream for a living.
Setaro: What are some of the main things that grantees typically spend their grant money on?
Ott: It’s really fascinating to learn as we go along. There have been 119 songs written. There’ve been 104 songs recorded, there’ve been 46 new songs released to the public, 195 performances outside Austin, 11 international performances, 44 performances for other charities, and so on.
Now, that doesn’t even capture everything the artist has done. That simply captures what they have to do to unlock their grant dollars thus far. Once they have unlocked those grant dollars, it’s amazing to see what they’ve done.
Lincoln Durham went back in the studio and recorded what he considers his best album to date. Graham Wilkinson paid for his 1943 Taylor guitar to be repaired.
Erin Ivey had just finished touring on an album when she got her grant. She thought to herself, how am I going to unlock my grant dollars? I ran into her about ten months into the year, and she said that she’d had the most amazing year, because she spent it looking up nonprofits whose missions she admired, and called them on the phone saying, “Hey, I’m Erin Ivey. Can I come play a concert for you for free?” She said it was one of the most emotionally fulfilling years as an artist she’d had, because she got to unlock $9,000 of her $10,000 grant by playing for public charities.
Kendrick: If you’re wondering what the success stories are out of it, we’re really only heading into our third giving season. But already our bands have been signed by labels, including Universal Music Group. Twenty or thirty new record releases have come out. For me, Black Fret is about artistic excellence. We want to hold ourselves up alongside the symphony and the opera and say, these are the finest musicians we can find. It’s not a need-based argument. It’s about finding those people who can create unbelievably beautiful art, and helping them do it.
One story to me that always percolates is, the very first grant we ever gave out was to Graham Wilkinson. Graham’s a six foot four white Rastafarian – an incredibly soulful, spiritual guy. He came to my house, because we didn't have an office. I hand him the check. Fifteen minutes later, I get a text message that says, “I wanted you to know I’ve been sitting in front of your house for fifteen minutes crying, because I get paid to sell beer, and you just paid me to write a song for the first time ever.”
