Allen Kovac – HuffPost 4.11.14

Mike Ragogna: I guess this is a good time to ask this. What advice do you have for new artists?

Allen Kovac: My advice for any artist, including a new artist, is that if you want to cut through the clutter, it’s all about quality of content. It’s not just whether or not you have a hit song; you have to have a hit album. And it’s not just whether or not you have a hit album. You have to have a creative eye and an image, and it’s not just having that image but telling that story through a video. And then it’s not just the video and the image and the music, but it’s also about your performance live. And you’ve got to compete. Especially in today’s world you have to compete, because anyone can make a CD. Anyone can make content, and the only thing that cuts through the clutter is quality. I was on a panel recently with a bunch of very successful managers, and they said you can’t sell records anymore, and I said, well, let’s say there’s this lady who made an album called Jagged Little Pill and it sold 25 million, and now here we are, a couple of decades later, and some other lady named Adele has sold 25 million records. So, it’s quality of content. Her voice is great. The other one’s voice was great. The lyrics are great, the structure was great, the melody was great. They performed it. It worked. That’s called patronage. It’s been going on since classical music. So I really believe that, and that’s what we tell our artists. If they’re willing to do all those things and compete, they can sell records. You know, Buckcherry made a great record for us. We sold a million and a half. They got rid of the producer. They never worked with him again, and the last record sold only 50,000. It’s just a function of what’s your standard, and are you able to compete objectively with whatever else is out there?