Coming in at No. 49 on Spin magazine’s recent list of “The 100 Sleaziest Moments in Rock”: Interscope Records’ 1998 purchase of three-minute blocks of advertising time on an Oregon radio station, and the label using that time to broadcast Limp Bizkit’s song “Counterfeit.” According to the lore, KUFO ran Interscope’s Limp Bizkit “ad” 50 times over a five-week period, and by the time the ads had left the air, the song was in heavy rotation. The label had bought a hit.
Sitting in a Nashville coffee shop about a month before that Spin issue hit the racks, David Hooper tells the very same Limp Bizkit story. The 27-year-old entrepreneur—who designs Web pages, runs a small label called Mind Kontrol Records, and dispenses promotional advice to musicians under the rubrics of Kathode Ray Music and indiebiz.com—is talking about ethics, and while Interscope’s legally in-bounds but ethically shaky method of spending its way to the top amuses him, it doesn’t surprise him.
“You need to play by the rules,” he says, implying that smart-ass tricks will only get you so far. “The industry will be around after I’m gone, and I can only go to the well so many times before it dries up. If I call people, they know I’m serious. The whole business is based on relationships.”
David Hooper is a likable contradiction—cunning but decent, with a mutual belief in making money and staying responsible. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t eat meat, and he’s devoutly committed to any political system that will help eradicate global class inequity. And he hypes music for a living, in an industry where getting an edge means indulging in wanton tomfoolery. Hooper vacillates, one moment eagerly sharing stories of how promo folk work their craft (“I know situations where Arista won’t sell Whitney [Houston] through Tower [Records] without them taking 80,000 units of another artist,” he chuckles) and the next moment decrying the mass-media mergers that are making tips and opinions less reliable (“If Ted Turner had a record label, would CNN slam their music?” he asks).
Mostly he lets a smile cross his gaunt face and makes precise gestures with lanky arms while speaking with the clarity and confidence that have made him a featured attraction at music conferences across the country. “I’ve never been one to work well with other people,” Hooper says, indulging in a little self-promotion. “I worked at Baskin-Robbins once and got canned because I had a better way of doing things.” Asked to clarify, he says that he tried to get his bosses to sell coffee and yogurt, since customers were always asking for them. “But the main thing was I just didn’t like people breathing down my neck.”
A graduate of the University of Memphis with a degree in commercial music, Hooper played music for a while but quickly realized his talents lie in innovative promotion. “I don’t like being onstage,” he recalls. “Besides, my degree is in this.” While still in Memphis, he began working as a street promotion coordinator for an L.A. company that had contracts with several major-label acts; his résumé still cites his work for bands like Bush and Lords of Acid.
Hooper explains that for Bush “[the label] spent $12,000 promoting the single. I just did one part of that. We were making sure Bush was in all the stores, making sure college kids had copies. We had like a three-song demo tape we were handing out. You know, hyping everybody up.” As for Lords of Acid, “My idea was to go to titty bars and hang out in tattoo parlors, pass out tapes to fans, pass out T-shirts. To sell a million, you have to give away a million.”
That’s one of the reasons Hooper loves the new, Internet-aided distribution system for music. “Digital is great,” he says, “because [music] can be given away cheap.” He has further affinities for computer-age marketing, as his numerous Web sites attest, but right now he’s on a roll as he speaks, listing no-brainer ways that a band can get the word out about its music.
“If it’s a New Age artist, go hang out in yoga chat rooms. The best way is word of mouth. We try to get the kids who want to be the first. Hang out in chat rooms, pay high school kids five bucks an hour.” Pay them for what? To talk up the band, Hooper explains.
But these are simple tricks that have little to do with what Hooper does in his daily capacity as an advisor to struggling acts. “What I offer is more than just tips,” he says. “More than just getting fans to a show. It’s artist development. It’s consulting. I can teach them how to do it a lot cheaper than I can do it myself.” The main thing Hooper teaches is that music can be a hobby or a career, and he forces his artists to decide how serious they are. “We call it ‘playing music,’ ” he says, “but we need to start treating it like a business.”
In pursuit of that directive—and to give his artists more than a fighting chance in the industry—Hooper imparts upon them his knowledge of some more mysterious aspects of the music business. In short: “I teach them the games that record labels play.
“There’s so much waste at labels,” he groans. “People staying at hotels and charging it back to the artist. A label guy offers to run out and get some food for the band, and then when the royalty statement comes, the band finds out they’ve been charged 25 bucks for pizza and Cheetos.” He shakes his head. “You know, there’ve been great albums recorded for $10,000.”
Hooper took major-label money for the first few years of his career, before leaving the majors behind and forming Kathode Ray. His early independent efforts were promotional compilations of unsigned bands, one of which caught the attention of a TV producer looking to license some background music. Have you ever noticed how the songs that play behind scenes of, say, The Real World or other shows on MTV always sound cooler than the music the network usually plays? Part of that is attributable to someone’s good taste, but part of it is due to the efforts of promoters like Hooper, who look to provide bargains. “They don’t want to pay big licensing fees, so they contact indie bands,” Hooper explains. “Someone from Viacom heard the CD and contacted us.” That first contact led to further revenue from TV, which helped Hooper build some credibility.
Meanwhile, he left Memphis and stopped in a few other places in the Southeast before settling in Nashville. “I was followin’ a woman around,” Hooper grins. By this time, he had also decided to take the experience he was gaining and pass on what he “learned from reading and interacting with people all day.” He already had a Web site—as well as his Mind Kontrol label, which was making money by releasing inexpensive collections of prank calls and celebrity bloopers—and he added a new wing to his self-powered empire: Indiebiz.com was set up to provide general advice and direct help to inexperienced musicians.
Most of Hooper’s aid comes in the form of paid subscriptions to a Tip Sheet-style newsletter, but he also dispenses his thoughts at seminars, via giveaway CD-ROMs, and soon via a Dummies-style book on promotion that he’s putting together with some associates. A few samples of what Hooper has to say:
♦ “It’s easy to get caught up in small-time alcohol endorsements and management contracts. Don’t. The deals you sign today for what seems like a lot of money will seem like chump change when the money really starts to roll in.”
♦ “We don’t make the rules, the people that buy from us do. Take it with a grain of salt, but if people are telling you your Web page is slow, your stage presence sucks, and you sing off-key, there may be something to their comments.”
♦ “If you’re good at talking to people on the phone, how come your drummer’s girlfriend is doing the booking for you?”
♦ “I actually had a band tell me last week in their bio, ‘We will change the face of rock ’n’ roll.’ C’mon! You’re a rock band from Boise! I know it’s hard to write a bio. But resist the temptation to call your band the next coming of Christ. If you’re just starting out, just tell the facts: what kind of music you play, where you’re from, what your goals are.... It is really irritating to read through an entire press kit and not find one description of the music’s genre. If I need to find a pop-alternative band, I will listen to the bands who told me they were pop-alternative.”
The different aspects of Hooper’s business are all displayed on his Web nexus, kathoderaymusic.com, which is comprised of a few other sub-sites, all of which together garner about 3,000 hits a day. “The site is designed to get me clients,” Hooper says. “I have one of those businesses that doesn’t sell itself.” Currently, he gets a lot of business from companies that want to learn how to promote on the Internet. “I’m at home 24-7, putting up sites.”
It’s clear that Hooper’s heart is in teaching more than doing, if only because the ruthlessness of his chosen field is still a little disconcerting. “Right now I’m just hangin’ in,” he says. “I’m at the right place at the right time, riding it out. Pretty soon I’ll be out of touch, and some 15-year-old will be on top.”
And at that point, what will he do? Hooper smiles, wrestling with another contradiction. Part of him wants to do massage therapy or yoga. The other part wants to be an eccentric millionaire.
