Martin Atkins:
There's a charm about this, or there's something that's pulling me in and you get better. You are pulling those initial audience members along for a ride that if you try to be perfect at the beginning, you're depriving your potential fan base of that journey with you.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music, but I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry, and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

Michael Walker:
All right. I'm excited to be here today with Martin Atkins. He has 40-plus years in the music business, founded the super group Pigface, contributed to Nine Inch Nails, administrator of the most celebrated periods. He's also the owner of Invisible Records, the founder of the Museum of Post Punk and Industrial Music in Chicago, also wrote three books on the music business, including Tour: Smart. And so, this is a guy who has been around for 40-plus years in the music industry, sing thing or two, been a part of many successful projects. I'm sure a few things you've witnessed changed in the past 40 years as it relates to the music business. So I'm really excited to have a conversation with you today and just talk about your experience and really how the landscape has changed and currently what you really see as the biggest waves that are approaching right now with the music industry. To kick things off, I would love to hear you share your story a little bit and how you really made it to this point over the last 40 years.

Martin Atkins:
I started playing drums when I was nine years old and somebody asked me like, "Ooh, what drew you to the drums?" My dad bought me a drum kit. It's just father and son stuff. If he bought me a lawn mower, this would be a landscape gardening interview. That's just fathers and sons. And so, he was absent. He was working really hard to support the family. So in his absence, I would play my drums four or five hours a day. I got pretty good to the point when I was 11 or 12, I joined my first band. I was drinking at the age of 11 in the clubs in the north of England, just bouncing around. So as I'm growing as an artist, punk happened '75, '76 in the UK. And so, I was good, but I was also bored with being good and so I was just right for a band who wanted to say, "Smash the system. Technical ability is bullshit." However, we need a drummer that can play.

Martin Atkins:
So, I ended up joining a band with Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols called Public Image Limited. I spent five years in that band. So by the age of 20, I was on the front cover of Melody Maker, did a John Peel session, a live TV show called Old Grey Whistle Test. And then six months after that, we were in America doing American bandstand, meeting Dick Clark. This is 1980. I was blessed and not blessed to have accomplished most things that most musicians would want to do by the time I was 22. We had a big hit around the world called This Is Not A Love Song, went to Australia, Japan twice, all over Europe, just whirlwind stuff, moved to New York City and then Los Angeles, and then decided to quit the music business because I wasn't having a very good time and then joined a band called Killing Joke.

Martin Atkins:
While I was in Killing Joke, I toured with Ministry during a fairly crazy period with the band Ministry. While I was on tour with Ministry, I started the super group Pigface, which has probably 600 members at this point. And so, that thing is still going. My label is still going. We did some Pigface dates in 2019. So Pigface is my social network. I met Randy Blythe, the singer from Lamb of God. He came out to do a couple of fill-in dates with Pigface and sat on the bus and just said, "Okay. Those last two days were great. I'm not leaving. Deal with it." So he did the remaining 17 shows with us. Danny Carey from tool, Flea from the Chili Peppers, Trent from Nine Inch, all these crazy people are in Pigface.

Martin Atkins:
So, I'm still doing it. I'm 63 next week. I've been teaching for almost 20 years. And so, I try and combine the real world of actually doing it with, "Hey students, come on tour," to involve my students in all of it. But I guess the overriding thing that comes to me is that I'm just really old. I started doing this when I was young. I've done a lot just because I'm still doing it and I'm oldest AF.

Michael Walker:
I can certainly say just from the way that you express yourself and from what you're still doing, I think old in a lot of cases that it is much more of a mindset and your youthful energy can come through, so that's pretty dang awesome. Pigface, so it sounds like you have this super group of all these amazing minds that are coming together to form a collective and being able to tour together. I love that idea. We just got back from our platinum artist retreat in Nashville. As we had an extra day there with our team leaders at Modern Musician, we were jamming out. We were making some music and then we were like, "Oh, it'd be fun if we created a super group." So it's pretty inspiring to see what you've done with Pigface. It's really cool. Yeah.

Martin Atkins:
Here's the thing though. So just I was suddenly in your shoes at this platinum camp. The thing about Pigface is there aren't any rules and we don't rehearse. If we do rehearse, we invite people and it becomes a show. So the thing that everybody's done removes the stress of us feeling like we're going to do this thing. Here are the five rules. It's got to be perfect. We let everybody know. We're winging it, come for the experience and sometimes it's amazing. Occasionally, it's terrible, but then 10 minutes later, it isn't. So it's a pretty cool thing. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
It's a very cool thing. Yeah, that's a great tip too. It sounds like it's something that's very creative and there's not rules to it and then that's part of what allows people to express themselves and be creative.

Martin Atkins:
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. So Martin, I know that you're coming from a place where you've achieved... You have some incredible success in your own music career, and then you have this camp of artists as well on Pigface and of really a really collective community. I know that over the past 20 years, you mentioned that you've been teaching. You've been helping other artists with all of this stuff. So I would love to hear from your perspective and experience, what do you say are some of the biggest mistakes or the biggest challenges right now that you see musicians struggling with when they first come to you?

Martin Atkins:
This has always been one, but it feels crazier, more OCD, ADD. Now, it's the pursuit of perfection. What do they say? Don't let perfection be the enemy of the good, I don't know, the good. I don't know. I don't know, something. But when an artist is coming up, it's all so that it feels natural to then be like, "Okay. If it is so important, then I've got to practice more. We've got to tune all the vocals. We've got to ha-ha-ha, but let's try another mix of this song." Next thing you know, you're a year and a half in to your first album, which you don't need to make an album anymore, and you're working on six different mixes of a song, huh, because it's so important.

Martin Atkins:
The thing that you are missing is feedback from an audience. And so, absent that feedback, you don't know what you're doing. You can have 10 songs and you should have 20. But let's say you have 10 songs and there's obviously three contenders that you're going to put the extra horns, the sparkle, the polish, the ooh-ooh-ooh, you go and perform those songs and people start walking out. Maybe you perform the two songs you're like, "Eh, I don't know if this will even make it on the album," and people start to move closer to stage. They just like the content, the lyrical delivery, the subject matter. Who knows? So you work on those songs. You don't know. You can't have amazing songs in a vacuum and you are depriving yourself and your audience from the experience of growing with you, right?

Martin Atkins:
So when you play to 15 people, some people will leave. Some people will be like, "Why this? I don't care. That last song was out of tune and the drummer is stumbling. There's something. There's a charm about this, or there's something that's pulling me in." You get better. You are pulling those initial audience members along for a ride that if you try to be perfect at the beginning, you're depriving your potential fan base of that journey with you, if that makes sense. It's difficult to just get out there. Don't be crap. Don't be disrespectful to your audience and go, "Oh, we're not tuning the guitar." Who cares? You've got to play to those 10 people as if you're in a stadium. You've got to respect your audience, but don't overthink this stuff and you'll start to feel songs differently. You'll start to understand yourself and your artistic vibe and let that do its thing.

Martin Atkins:
I also see that same philosophical mistake a band will say, "Eh, we're too small to have merchandise. We're going to wait until we get to..." Everything's waiting to this point. You might be too small to have 400 shirts drop shipped from the manufacturer, but you're not too small for you to be in your basement learning how to tie dye, spray painting, stencil and bleaching, stitching, sewing, whatever you want to do, and have five shirts at your first shelf, because there are people who maybe just you don't even like your songs want to support you on this journey and they will buy the stuff that you've made. And so, once again, you are creating these bridges with early fans to grow with you.

Martin Atkins:
They won't care that there's a thumbprint on the T-shirt. "Oh, wow. This arm is actually hanging off." This thrift store shirt that you bought, the arm is actually hanging off. "It's okay. I'll fix it." Or they just keep it with the arm hanging off because that's a story for three years down the line where you're in this House of Blues, "Yeah. I bought this shirt at their first show. The arm is still hanging off." So people, so jump in and do it and start this journey as soon as possible. Am I making any sense?

Michael Walker:
It totally makes sense. Yeah, that's so good. So it sounds like what you're saying is that one of the biggest mistakes, and this is something that has been around since you've been making music, has been this perfectionism, or almost like a sense of fear, maybe, of really letting yourself be imperfect and putting something out. It causes people to drag their feet to extend to take a year and a half to record an album, rather than doing the most important thing, which is putting it out, seeing how people respond, seeing what resonates, and then using that as a clue to be able to tune your guitar as it would be. Super smart.

Martin Atkins:
I was watching this Shania Twain documentary last night and she made two of huge albums before she toured and she's, "Oh crap, what have I done? There is now so much pressure, but on my live show..." She did that to herself, but she grew up singing in bars so she handled it. But I think that absent 20 things that need to be done, people will focus on the two things they think they should be doing, which is getting better at guitar or practicing singing, or remixing the song again. There's lots of things to be busy with to help with the neurosis that is being in a band, of being an artist.

Michael Walker:
So good. The follow-up question to that is if one of the biggest mistakes or challenges is this sense of over perfectionism and wanting to wait too long, to put something out to "ship it," how can someone who might be facing that challenge or facing that struggle right now, how do they overcome that? What do you re recommend for them to do to be able to get through that perfectionism and actually put themselves out there?

Martin Atkins:
It's just to do it.

Michael Walker:
Yeah.

Martin Atkins:
Let me just grab my bag. I want to show you something. Sorry. Oh, there we go. So, you want to be in the music business and we are guided by mythology to think about what is success in the music business, a platinum album. I don't even know what that is anymore. So here's this artist we work with. I work with my students. This is a seven-inch lathe cut single. They lathe and it's a clear seven-inch lathe cut.

Michael Walker:
That's good.

Martin Atkins:
And then they're expensive because they're made individually.

Michael Walker:
Wow.

Martin Atkins:
It's the opposite of trying to sell 5,000. It's a split seven-inch. So there's an artist on one side, an artist on the other. So there's two reasons for somebody to buy this seven-inch and they put 20 sleeves together and do this big painting and then split them up and number them and sell them individually. Their first pressing was 20 units, 20, which you might say, "Why do you even bother?" They sold out. So they did another pressing and they'll sold. Now, they're on the third pressing. So they've done something which artists need to do, which is to control their own story.

Martin Atkins:
So now, the artists, or I can say on their behalf, if I was trying to impress somebody, I would miss out the fact that they only made 20. I might say, "I'm working with students on this album with this guy called Riddle and Marble Teeth on the other side." It's already on its third pressing. Oh, woo. You are going to think, "Oh wow, that's probably done thousands then." I might just let you think that, but we're creating a story. Journalist, blogger went into a story in Decatur, Illinois, where the band are from, and saw the crazy deep brush strokes of paint on this, was like, "What is this?" Picked it up. Once somebody picked something up, they're 60% more likely to buy it. Bought the single, wrote a review that was obnoxious talking about who would've ever thought there's a record store in Decatur, Illinois, but then he listened to the record and liked it.

Martin Atkins:
So by putting the effort into the art, by differentiating, and that's the word, differentiating themselves from the other seven-inch singles in the bin, other artists, by making this rare and precious immediately, they got reviewed, really good review apart from the stuff about Decatur, a really great review that now they can regurgitate that to other people and make another seven-inch with a different track on it. So even though the quantities are tiny, they're building their fan base and instead of saying for the next year, because let's say they made 1,000 seven inch singles. "Okay. We've still got 968 left. Buy one, get one free," you become like a CVS, buy one, get one Tuesday, but now they're on making their next one.

Martin Atkins:
They can remake this first one, but their fans from two months ago got this first single, they're looking for the next one, whether it's a T-shirt or another single or cassette tape, difficult to do vinyl because of the long turnaround times, but we just did a USB cassette. There's all kinds of things you can do. Now, you're creating these relationships with people who will buy your next single, your next T-shirt. They'll come to your next show having heard these two singles and wearing the T-shirt that they bought from you and the trajectory, whatever the numbers are, thousands or tens, you are building. I guess the other part of this is realizing, I say it's seven years to become an overnight sensation. The sooner you start putting bricks in your Great Wall of China, the sooner you'll have a pile of bricks to stand on and for people to look at and go, "What the hell are you doing?"

Michael Walker:
All right. Let's take a quick break from the podcast. I can tell you about a free special offer they're doing right now exclusively for our podcast listeners. So if you get a ton of value from the show, but you want to take your music career to the next level, connect with the community of driven musicians and connect with the music mentors directly that we have on this podcast, or if you just want to know the best way to market your music and grow an audience right now, then this is going to be perfect for you. So right now, we're offering a free two-week trial to our MusicMentor coaching program. If you sign up in the show notes below, you're going to get access to our entire MusicMentor content vault for free. The vault is organized into four different content pillars. The first being the music, then the artist, the fans, and last but not least, the business. When you sign up, you unlock our best in-depth master classes from a network of world-class musicians and industry experts on the most cutting-edge strategies right now for growing your music business.

Michael Walker:
On top of that, you'll get access to our weekly live masterminds, where our highest level of Modern Musician coaches teach you exactly what they're doing to make an income and an impact with their music. Then once a month, we're going to have our MusicMentor spotlight series, and that's what we're going to bring on some of the world's biggest and best artist coaches, successful musicians to teach you what's working right now. One of the most amazing parts is that you can get your questions answered live by these top level music mentors, so a lot of the people that you hear right here on the podcast, where they're live interacting with you personally. So imagine being able to connect with them directly.

Michael Walker:
On top of all that, you'll get access to our private music metro community. This is definitely one of my favorite parts of MusicMentor and maybe the most valuable is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and discuss everything related to your music career. So if you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now and sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing content, connect with the community and sign up for the live masterclasses that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast, supporting the show, so don't miss it out. Go sign up for free now. Now, let's get back to our interview.

Michael Walker:
That's so good. Yeah, there's a ton of good stuff in there. One thing that I want to point back to that you had mentioned that I think it's a really important point is that it's better to start smaller and sell out of something than to start with way too many and then kind of like way oversupply, just a supply and demand. Even when it comes to touring and playing shows, it feels so much better to play a sold out show to a hundred cap room then to play for a show to 250 people in a thousand cap room, just from that feeling of it's tight. It just feels like a bigger show when you're there and it's connected and it's filled to the brand.

Martin Atkins:
That's a really difficult thing. I just say to people always play the smallest venue and I'm also telling myself that, because here I am, 63, and I have an ego. I am a person. When an agent says to me, "We just got the offer from Oklahoma City, like 10 grand for this 1,200 capacity venue." I'm like, "Yeah, look out Oklahoma. Woo, woo, woo. I guess I am huge and Oklahoma has finally realized it." And then within an hour, I'm like, "Tuesday night in Oklahoma? Tuesday night in Chicago, 1,200 people. Absolutely. I don't think we've ever played in Oklahoma City. I don't know anybody. This is a nightmare. What's going to happen, Martin?" Let your rational brain take over from the swaggering brain and get your head on straight.

Martin Atkins:
So, I tell artists play in a phone booth because then you can call up your agent or a publicist and, "How was the show last night?" You could not move. You could not move in there. There was condensation running down the walls and I'd be like, "Oh my goodness." I can lie at will. I've got four kids. I teach students. But if you can't, if you have to tell the truth, always book the smallest venue. There's formulas to do with crowd density. There's a different energy when people are packed together than when they're spread apart. Once again, you can write your own story. You can always go back and play. You can add a second show. Second show added, ooh, that's great, because if you have an early show that ends at 10:00 on a Friday, no one's going home.

Martin Atkins:
You'll sell out the second show because 50% of the people from the first show will hang around. And then you can get smart with it, have a different opening act for the second show. Then you can sprinkle a little bit of fairy dust on. "Oh my goodness. Our original xylophone player is back from South America. He's joining us for the second show. We're doing acoustic, our first album on South American acoustic instruments." So people are like, "Oh my God, I'm going to both shows." So it looks like you've sold a hundred tickets to each show to 200 people, but really you've sold tickets to 120 people. 80 of the first show are coming to the second show, and that looks great for an agent who will think you've sold 200 tickets in whatever town.

Martin Atkins:
That's just discipline, understanding the story and understanding your own ego and not listening, sometimes not listening to an agent or a manager. It's not your agent's job to carefully nurture your career. It's your agent's job to book the most biggest shows wherever they can. Your manager might work with an agent to dial the venue size down and maybe also dial the ticket price down, which is also important. That's another role of the ego is, "Ooh, $20 ticket, look out Atlanta. Woo-hoo." Do you know anybody with $20 with parking and a T-shirt and four or five drinks? Maybe it should be $8.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, really good points. It sounds like the other thing that you had noted was how one of the biggest mistakes is waiting for a moment in time where, "Okay. Now I'm big enough, I can start selling merchandise and I can start treating this like a business, but only once I get to this point," and how there's some flawed thinking there that because in order to reach that point, you need to build things from the foundation where you're connecting with your fans. If you don't have a profitable business, when you have a hundred fans, then you're probably not going to have a profitable business when you have a thousand fans either because you just haven't gotten the margins in place. You don't have a system going.

Martin Atkins:
So that's the other thing that you need to learn as an artist. I think traditionally, we think, "Look, it's the show. When is the show?" The show starts when your vehicle arrives at the venue, your first interaction with two people who are still around having lunch, who might stick around or whoever. The show starts when your vehicle arrives and it doesn't end until the vehicle leaves. When you need to train yourself to "Yes, Cleveland. Woo. We're coming back in two... So it's sold out tonight. We're coming back in two months time" and instead of going in the dressing room to decompress, it's exhausting for me to talk to people, more exhausting than playing drums. I just feel the stress, but you need to walk off the front of the stage and go straight to the merch booth and put the merchandise between you and every conversation.

Martin Atkins:
So, hopefully, there's three people that want to talk to you. While you're talking to one person, the other two people are picking things up, looking at them, 60% more likely to buy, grabbing things for you that they want you to sign, understanding that you're running your business and wanting to support you. And so, when the shows get higher stress, you've trained yourself to the only place you are going. You want to go in the dressing room. You are all sweaty and there's a shower and clean towels by the look of it. You'd never know, but you want to go in the dressing room. You want to punch the guitarist and hug the keyboard player because they saved you when they added an extra bar, but you've got to get straight off the front of the stage to the merch boot.

Martin Atkins:
Similarly, before the show, you're setting up the merch, you're making sure it's in the right place because the venue will say, "Yeah. No, put it in the basement." No, we're putting it by the front door where every single person's going to see it with a light. So you get used to setting that up. And then you grab everybody's guests. When it's Pigface, you've got 16 people in the band, it's a nightmare of pieces of paper. Somebody's written very clearly. Somebody's showing you something on their phone. Somebody else has written badly and Sharpie on a barn napkin. You assemble all of this stuff into a clearly typed guest list.

Martin Atkins:
At first, it doesn't seem... Why would it be worth doing that? Because there's eight people on the guest list, but this becomes part of your routine. So when it's 60 people, you are already in guest list typing mode or somebody in the bands taken on that role and now you are less likely to have a problem at the door with the guest list because there isn't 70 pieces of paper. It's this neatly type list, which you can save, refer back to two years down the line. Did that journalist come and see us then? Has this person been to see us before? Boom, boom. So you're also showing the venue that you are running your business. You're less likely to get F with the more you present as a professional operation.

Michael Walker:
100%. Yeah. That's so good. Lots of gold nuggets that we're dropping as you were just sharing, lessons around making sure that you're present at the merch table and right after going, spending time there. There is something about just that idea of... Because it seems like it's one of the most challenging things for a lot of musicians is making offers or presenting or, yeah, it's excelling something essentially. They don't want to come across the wrong way or whatnot. The truth is that the amount... If you don't ever make any offers or if it's never present, if people don't see it, if they don't know it's there, then of course, they're not going to buy anything. You're not going to sell anything.

Michael Walker:
On the other hand, like you mentioned, if you make it so that people see it repeatedly, even if you're not yelling at them like, "Hey, go buy this," but you're just standing there and they have spare time. They're in proximity. They're picking it up. What do you say? It was a 60% increased chance that they buy if they pick it up, super smart. That makes sense too. I know when we were "tour hacking" and we were basically going approaching people waiting in lines for shows and connecting with them and then offering CDs, they liked it. I do remember, this was something probably more subconscious or maybe I just noticed that it worked better if we did this, but when we would hand out the CD, so everyone could look at it, that made a big difference, probably about a 60% increase in amount of people that actually got one, so that's a great tip as well, just getting it in people's hands that they can play around with it. They can experience it. Super smart. Awesome.

Michael Walker:
Let's go a little bit deeper into what do you say are some of the biggest, the things right now they exceed that are transforming in the music industry and maybe some opportunities or trending things that you think maybe people are a little bit behind the curve on, where almost if we imagine that we're surfers right now and we're trying to see, what's the wave that's coming right now? What's cresting? How can we gain momentum with that? In your perspective, what are some of those things that people should be paying attention to right now because there's a wave coming and we should catch it?

Martin Atkins:
I think the thing that I've seen is that there's always a wave and you've always just missed it. This is one of the advantages of doing this for a while. When I was coming up, everybody was starting their own label, then starting their own studio, pressing vinyl. And then it's CDs. Indestructible CDs are not indestructible actually. And then it's streaming downloads and then streaming and NFTs. It's everybody's, "Oh, screw this. It's this." It's, "Yeah. No, it isn't." The most successful NFTs have a physical component. So to me, it's like the opportunity now is in face-to-face talking to people, the lost art of being physical.

Martin Atkins:
It's much easier not to tour. "Oh, gas prices. Let's wait until gas price..." No, go on tour now, but think this through, be strategic. Gas prices are ridiculous and I've got spreadsheets, so I can type in the mileage, the different vehicles and you could see what the nightmare is going to be, but what a great time to strategically... If you have a 15-passenger vehicle, find a duo that will tour with you. I know you've got this broken down vehicle that gets nine miles. The guy tour with us will share these expenses and that you form these alliances. There's always opportunity in something. Maybe you go crazy and go on a bus tour with three artists on a bus and maybe it's cheaper doing that than it is with three artists in three vehicles with three trailers.

Martin Atkins:
So, I see people looking for the... What do you call it? The intoxication of global success and the only way to get there is to start small and succeed locally first and play to 10 people and be nice to those 10 people and then go and play to 20 somewhere else. There is a stamina required. Once again, the Shania Twain documentary is she's like those records didn't happen. She was just on morning talk shows, afternoon chat shows, in a limousine doing in record stores. Wherever these opportunities are, you can elbow your way to get some attention by being there and it's the hardest thing.

Martin Atkins:
So, I tell my students or anybody get five jobs. You could call them hustles and they're like, "What?" Some of my students have already got four, but great, and they hate two of them. Great. At some point, you might be able to replace your least favorite, worst paying hustle. With this other hustle you've created, like the person who makes my voodoo dolls for me. You stumble into these things, but whether you are coming up or succeeding, if you are lucky, it's 28 hours a day of, "Oh my goodness. At last, I can sleep because it's eight hours until the sound check in Atlanta".

Martin Atkins:
Oh, you've got a radio phone over with a station in Norway, you should be so lucky to be so sleep deprived. So, why not just jump in and have five hustles from the get-go and could work with another artist? You could do merchandise for another artist. You could develop that skillset. You could learn on the road with another artist like, "I'm never doing that," but develop that skill set. There are all kinds of... I had a list, I think, in my book, Band:Smart, of side hustles that won't completely derail your ambition. Somebody was working in a used furniture warehouse store, which was populated with all kinds of touring artists. It was a thing that the owner did. There was always somebody on tour, but there was always five people not on tour. Most of the bands rehearsed in the furniture warehouse.

Martin Atkins:
It was like there are situations that are good. They don't always need to be connected. If you're a guitarist, you don't need to sell guitars at Guitar Center. Maybe working on in a restaurant gets you free food, gets you the ability for when a national touring comes through, you say, "Hey, contact somebody on Facebook. I work at this seafood restaurant. Does anybody like seafood? I'd love to stop by with some po'boy sandwiches." Oh, suddenly, you are interacting with national touring artists because you've rolled up your sleeves and took a side hustle in a restaurant. I did a-

Michael Walker:
Absolutely.

Martin Atkins:
I did a thing. I did a consult for a band in L.A. and they were rehearsing every day in their own rehearsal space, because they had to have their own rehearsal space so everything was right. I did this plan for them. There's six people in the band. I'm like, "Why don't you share your rehearsal space with another band?" They were outraged, but they didn't know what they would do with this time that I was giving them back. I called this supermarket and they have jobs 15, $12 an hour, I think, at the time, stocking shelves four-hour shifts overnight.

Martin Atkins:
I'm like six months from now, I showed them, they would have almost 20 grand in their band fund, where they could buy a vehicle that would forever change their touring profile or press up vinyl or a little bit of both where they were outraged. They begrudgingly took my printed up consult. Yeah, but that's what it takes. It's like people say all the time, you got to look outside the box. You do. You find these other hustles and other people you can help, other people you can work with and that creates some momentum for you.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Yeah, there's a lot of wisdom in there. I remember with Paradise Fears, with our band, when we first started out, we did exactly that. I remember working at Hy-Vee, a grocery store locally, and we all got hourly jobs. We stocked shelves and we saved up money to record our first album. There's a lot of truth in that. One thing that I want to point out that you mentioned, and this is something that I found with a lot of people, when you develop mastery in any skillset or any industry, it seems like there's this shift in focus to really the fundamentals of success and what's truly important, and a little bit of a... Not that there's not an appreciation for kind of like the tactics or the new things of today, the things like... Because there are always new waves, right? There's new waves that are coming, but you've been around for long enough to see, "Oh yeah. There's waves that come all the time."

Michael Walker:
The most important thing isn't necessarily that you have to catch this one wave. It's that you learn how to swim in the water and you're willing to do the work and you're willing to... And you can keep trying to catch the waves and pay attention. The water in this ocean of your music industry is what you talk to. It's about building relationships and connections and that face-to-face connection that you keep pointing back to. The fact that that's what you bring things back to, I think, is a great indicator of your experience and of kind of like your mastery in this realm that the tactics, the strategies, the stuff is great and sure, it's important, but it changes all the time, like CDs, vinyls, NFTs. Yeah.

Martin Atkins:
So I have a strategy that works all the time. It's just called do the opposite, do the opposite. So whatever is going on, you just need to be doing the opposite of that, because by the time you get a huge digital screen on stage... It's happened to me at a show. There's six bands. Every one of them to differ in degrees of effectiveness have got their on-stage videos or just a logo. By the time you've seen five bands with this digital stuff, you're completely desensitized to it. If somebody were to turn it off and walk on stage with candles, you'd be like, "Ooh, candles. Ooh, it's amazing. He's doing the shadows. Oh, and he blew on the candle." When he said go and the candle blew out and it was darkness, or if everybody's coming out with candles, fantastic, digital screen.

Martin Atkins:
So Kevin Lyman told me, he invented the Warped Tour, he started booking shows in California at ski resorts. I'm like, "Oh, that makes perfect sense." Out of season. I'm like, "What?" There's no competition and people were starved for entertainment. So even as mediocre shows, people were just like, "Yeah." Because for mediocre bands, when you haven't seen a band for two months, so context is important. You just take that philosophy and run with it. So you don't go to New York City. Don't play New York, just don't play that because everybody just saw Elton John naked with free lobsters and that was yesterday afternoon. There's so much going on. Everybody's so busy. Go somewhere where people aren't busy. Be great on a Tuesday, doesn't always have to be a Friday.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Yeah, that's super smart. What that reminds me of is that concept of the Purple Cow. Remember who is the author who wrote that book?

Martin Atkins:
Seth Goldin.

Michael Walker:
Seth Goldin. Exactly what you're describing. If you're just blending in with everyone else, then no one will really notice. But if you can see, okay, what's the common context? Everyone's doing this. And then you do the opposite, you're a purple cow. If you're driving down the street and you see this herd of cows and one of them is purple, it sticks out. You noticed it.

Martin Atkins:
I did a seven-inch single, oh my goodness, 15 years ago, Scratch-N-Sniff blueberry. It's just once you can screen print, it's the same thing, blueberry centered in and it dries and scratches stuff. And so, it just changes the conversation. What does it sound like? It's blueberry. End of story. It scratches it. Oh, and you don't have to ask somebody to buy it. It's Scratch-N-Sniff blueberry. Oh my goodness. The music can't be terrible, but it doesn't have to be amazing because it's in a Scratch-N-Sniff blueberry sleeve.

Michael Walker:
That's awesome. I love that idea. Cool. So Martin, so along this lines of the line of conversation of there's different tactics and strategies, and those are important. One of them is you to describe being different by doing things that's are out of the box, being creative, the scratch and stiff. But then there's also some of those things that are foundational that's part of the core strategy that they don't change. I would love to hear your take on what are some of those things or what would you recommend as something that hasn't changed in the past 40 years that you've been doing this successfully? What are some of those things that it's as different? CD, vinyl, NFTs, all things that have come and gone. What's the thing that maintains current that every band needs to do if they want to be successful?

Martin Atkins:
Well, you have to differentiate yourself, right? Whatever is going on, you either need to be the number one thing in that, which you're not going to be because somebody got the technology early, whatever, but you need to differentiate yourself. So where everybody has digital screens, my band has chicken wire and Christmas lights, which I buy the day after Christmas for nothing. We had spelled out S-H-I-T. It's like Kiss, except it's not Kiss. It's my band Pigface and these eight-foot high word behind us. It's funny and it didn't cost much money. So you need to always think about that, your music, your lyric, how are you differentiating, everything, how are you combining things, two bass players and a drummer, three guitarists and a drum machine. Nobody uses horn sections anymore and I understand why. They sound amazing. There's three more people on tour. Okay. Maybe there's something there.

Martin Atkins:
People convince themselves, "I've got some samples on my keyboard." That's not a horn section. There's a vibe, right? Understand how you can differentiate yourself. Once you're doing all of that, you need the work ethic, the 28-hour day work ethic. One of the things that does, that the stocking shelves does is it humbles you as you should be. We're all just working stiffs, trying to do this, and gain skills, pay the bills, do the things that are important. So once you walk in other people's shoes and you can understand, like the price of our ticket in Oklahoma, that's two hours working at my fast food job. If this is our audience, if I am our audience, if people like me, our audience, I think that's too much. Or maybe it makes you realize we should be free for educators or free for anybody with a fast food job or whatever it is, all of these activities inform the direction you take and the person that you are and that's what people latch onto.

Martin Atkins:
The songs can't be shit, but you also cannot be an asshole and you need to be humble. That's another mistake that you see a lot. I think I'm still very shy, but people who succeeded and you want to emulate what they do, where it's a stage move or a crazy microphone thing. I think some of us started to emulate assholes in the '80s and that became a thing and the audience became an imposition. I think management would encourage that divide, the mystique, which separated you from the audience. So I think it's our job to connect with the audience and be humble. And then you'll see the next thing coming down the line.

Martin Atkins:
We resisted the VIP ticketing. I think it's common for artists who came up when I did through punk to have this common man feel, so naturally VIP ticketing becomes a question mark. Who are we? Are we VIPs? But when you embrace that, you can provide a service to some people who have got bags of money to spend on an experience. But one of the ways we justify that is that enables us as our audience ages out, as we age out, to offer free tickets to anybody who's undergoing hardship, medical difficulties, whatever. We can gleefully take that money from the VIP stuff and offer free tickets for people who were at that first show 25 years ago, '91, longer, who were at those first shows who did support us, who made the difference and now we can make a difference for them.

Martin Atkins:
So it's by being involved in this stuff that you can see where the trends are going and what's coming next. I guess that's one of the things that led me to open my museum is like I saw the line up for something called Hell Fest in France and it was like my resume. It was Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Killing Joke. I think Skinny Puppy who... I produced a Skinny Puppy album and I'm like, "Whoa, what a crazy day?" And then my second thought was, "What a nightmare, standing in a field for five bands, so that's six hours with change up. What an absolute nightmare." I thought that my museum would be more just a different offering for fans of this music who don't want to stand in a field for six hours in France. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
So cool. Hey, Martin, I super appreciate you hopping on here to share your experience and perspective, 40-plus years in the music industry and it seems like you're one of those rare mentors who both is speaking from experience and through doing it and putting things into action and also being able to transmit that to create a community and a team around what you're doing and share it with other people. It's just super awesome.

Martin Atkins:
Thank you.

Michael Walker:
Appreciate what you're doing. For anyone who's listening or watching this right now, who'd like to learn more or connect deeper with what you offer, could you share where they can go to connect?

Martin Atkins:
Yeah. Following me on Twitter is pretty good. I'm @marteeeen, M-A-R-T four E-N on Twitter. I tweet every day. I'm on Instagram as flowersfightforsunshine. I know all my handles are supposed to be the same, but they're not. I'm always posting on Insta. And then if you go to Insta and look at my bio, you can see my Linktree, which has events and all kinds of stuff, anything that we have going on.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Cool. Like always, we'll put all the links and everything in the show notes for easy access. But yeah, Martin, thanks again. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on here today.

Martin Atkins:
Thanks. It was nice to talk to you.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value at its episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about their guests today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us, that really helps us out. Third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us switch more musicians like you who want to take their music careers to the next level. It's time to be modern musicians now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.