December 5, 1992, my brother and I pulled off Supernova's first concert, an eight band showcase at the long defunct Spectrum club on the Danforth in Toronto, Canada. 600+ people attended with only one week's promotion. We were elated. Still in high school and university, my brother and I found a means to do what we love and yet, make money doing it. A dream come true. Since university was still heavily subsidized in Canada at that time, I had made enough in that one show to pay for my whole year's tuition. I was self sufficient. And we earned it all ourselves. It was a great feeling.
The music biz was different back then. CDs and international super bands ruled the roost. The Internet was a grey background with blue text links. Nobody even had email. We advertised a "hotline" on colored flyers around town, looking for bands looking for their first gigs (the hotline was a new phone line that lead to my bedroom of my folks' house where we both still lived). Our "database" of bands comprised of an old school binder with looseleaf paper and hand written names and numbers. It would be nearly three months before we could find enough bands to mount another show. Young indie bands were hard to find, and they certainly weren't in demand.
Today of course, it's all different. Indie bands are all the rage. They're everywhere. Bands sign up on Supernova.com daily, a robust social network for bands, fans, and industry about 80 pages deep on a .php platform. Bands use their admin home page to request gigs from a schedule and are featured in complex social music promotions and marketing campaigns aligned with some of the biggest brands in the country. There are 21,000 in a MySQL database playing in 20+ shows a MONTH, across North America.
I'm out of my bedroom and in a 4,300 sq. ft. office in downtown Toronto in the trendy West Queen West area with some 20+ booking, production, marketing, and interactive staff. I deal with cash flow, financing, strategy, technology, product plans, client pitches, human resources issues, hiring and firing, and lots and lots of meetings.
I've gone from promoting my friends' bands to promoting 30 Seconds to Mars, Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace, Gym Class Heroes, Finger Eleven, Moneen, Silverstien, Theory of a Dead Man, gob, Sum 41, Billy Talent, Mariannah's Trench, Down With Webster, Faber Drive, and so on...
We've come such a long way, and yet, compared to the vision, it feels like there's still such a long way to go. We're still way under the radar compared to music greats like MySpace, Live Nation, or iTunes, and even much smaller successes like Reverbnation, iLike, PureVolume, Ourstage, etc. But momentum seems to be on our side. Could 2010 be the year Supernova finally breaks out into the mainstream? That would be a great feeling... but part of me wonders if we'll ever have the same pure, raw, innocent feeling of that first time we encountered music business success, like we did that night back in 1992.
