Thursday, Sept. 15th
Thursday afternoon I sat at my computer browsing the CMJ website and feeling overwhelmed. Insert a “FUCK!” every five minutes as I tried to work out a schedule that would let me see all the bands I wanted to see yet not cost $100 in cab fares traveling between venues.

I ended up only seeing one band that night: Idiot Pilot at Crash Mansion. They were a conundrum, if I had to describe them in one word. I was tempted to hold up a sign that read, “Choose one: Death Cab OR Screamo.” You really can’t mix the two. Afterward I headed over to CBGB for Nightmare of You. But when I got there at nine, I was informed that they weren’t letting any more badges into the show, which SUCKED! If there’s one complaint I have about CMJ this year, it’s the strict badge quota at almost every venue.

My crew (two girlfriends) and I decided to hit up the Atlantic Records party in Chelsea. A few bands performed at the party; The Fury was first on the bill. I’d heard some hype, so it was nice to see them. Lead singer Jeremy Lublin’s voice is addictive, and fellow band members Chris Hatfield (guitar), Todd Wherle (keyboards), Alan Hoffar (bass), and Steve Lublin (drums) played punkified 70’s glam music. My only concern was that none of the band members looked older than sixteen.

Friday, Sept. 16th

Friday morning I awoke with a hangover-from-hell, and decided to take it easy. I hit up some of the later panels at Lincoln Center. I sat in on A&R Reality Check: What Your Friends Won’t Tell You, a discussion about how A&R is conducted these days with panelists Jake Hum, A&R Director at Palm Pictures; Joe Poindexter, A&R Director at Elementree/Geffen Records; Terry Tomkins, NE Regional Director of A&R at Columbia Records; and Sam Shah of ATO Records/MICK Management.

The idealistic view – that bands can bombard a label, indie or major, with demos and expect to get more than 30 seconds of attention – has been drastically outdated by the emergence of the Internet. Resources such as Myspace and Purevolume allow those in A&R to easily keep track of bands gaining attention in the indie world. Demos can pile up on shelves for months before someone gets around to listening to them or just throwing them out. While this may seem discouraging and unfair to many musicians out there, panelist Joe Poindexter pointed out that a band shouldn’t be working towards getting a record contract, but instead going out there and playing shows because that’s what they love to do. Poindexter continued on to say that if a band is putting their all into spreading their music to the world, labels will come to them and not the other way around. Most bands being signed to labels these days are being signed because they’ve been playing shows for years and generating an interest because of that, not because they’ve shopped their demos at every label on the face of the planet and Island Records just so happened to listen to the copy they got and loved the band immediately from that moment forward.

At the end of the discussion, the panelists spent a few minutes listening to various demos submitted by bands to the panel to be critiqued as an example of how a typical A&R director judges a demo he or she hears. This was a great illustration of the earlier panel discussion. Each band’s demo got about 30 seconds of listening time – or just until the first chorus was finished – and afterwards, panelists discussed the sound and what sort of audience would be attracted to the music. Panelists emphasized how important it is to have a unique sound and also how important audience consideration is in the A&R world. With the American audience being very drawn to categorizing music, it’s especially important that any band an A&R director brings to his or her label has an audience out there.

Stay tuned for part 3/3 of Shawna's CMJ Survior's Diary '05 and check
back for Rachel Waxman's CMJ coverage coming soon!