Music-branding Guru Archie Hamilton of Split Works/Splatter

Archie Hamilton is at the forefront of band promotion, festival management and youth marketing in China. Since moving here in 2005, his company Split Works has made possible Chinese tours for the likes of Sonic Youth, Faithless and many others. Until recently, Split Works has promoted cutting edge brands (including Converse, Apple and Bacardi), mostly through the music industry. With some exciting gigs coming up and the recent development of new sister company Splatter taking over the branding side of the business, we caught up to catch on.

You’re pretty busy these days with your new company Splatter, what are you doing differently and what will Splatter specialise in?
Well, we’ve always dealt with brands since our year-long campaign with Bacardi in 2006. But what we found is that a lot of brands – rightly or wrongly – still believe in the traditional music market and that TV is a given to chew up most of the market. What we do is we like to communicate between entertainment content and social media.

When we were selling ourselves as this kind of hybrid company – part booking agent, part gig promoter, part branding agency, we just confused the hell out of people. When you’re dealing with brands, they want to know that they are your primary concern. When you’re dealing with musicians they want to know that they are your primary concern. So, we went with the idea of separating the two.

Was there a leap of faith involved for brands? How did you decide what was the right forum for the right brand?
Well, yes, looking back on 2006 and 2007, this was new territory. When we did the Yue festival the first time around, it was a first, but the Love Noise tour particularly was a real watershed for brands looking at the way they use experience and how they use social media. It’s both an education and a waiting game. Steering away from traditional media like radio and print and going viral back then was a huge leap. Now, a few years on, I think that’s become standard. Most large brands have moved their expansion online.

I have a huge respect, for example, for Converse. They definitely took the bull by the horns back then. There was a large sum of money involved for a brand like that. It worked out well but this is my bugbear as well as my challenge: to persuade brand managers and their respective agencies to take a bit of a risk.

I look at so much of what happens in this industry and it’s so standardized. It has created a dull kind of branding which is basically a celebrity on underground ads presenting yet another product just in a different pose wearing a different coloured shirt. When you see even more brands jumping on that bandwagon, they just start to look silly and unimaginative.

This popularity measurement tool you’ve come up with – band love, what is it all about?
Well, basically about three years ago in Shanghai I lost a fairly obscene amount of money bringing over a band that was a big band in the UK and Europe. When they arrived in China for pre-promotion stuff, we realised that they had about five fans in China and I paid for it. As a result of that, I turned around and thought; I have to understand this better myself.
So, we developed a tool that takes 60 different relative metrics and plugs them into an algorithm, it spits out a number. That number sits relative to a bunch of other numbers and tells me how big that band can be. It has to be used with experience and instinct but it hasn’t actually failed me 10% either way with tickets sold. Over here there’s nothing like album sales, nothing like radio play to give us an idea, everything that we measure is unknown.

So, we’ve been doing that for three years. We’ve done about 900 different bands. I haven’t lost money on a show or tour since.

So, does band love tell us what we should look out for?
There’s a band called World’s End Girlfriend who are a Japanese operatic rock band, that sound is very hot here at the moment, they’ve got this melodic, sad way of expressing themselves.

I’m really looking forward to bringing over The Cave Singers, I saw them at South by Southwest and they were my favourite band of the week. They’re a great, great live band.

Jue festival will see its third incarnation in 2011; it was preceded by the Yue festival in 2007. What prompted the change from that big outdoor music festival to the present ten-day music and art festival?
I think the key for me was standing on a beautiful day in Zhongshan Park (Shanghai) with lots of people having fun, thinking; I’ve paid about USD 50 per person to throw this party. I suddenly thought: This is ridiculous! One of the things that I promised myself when I first arrived here was not to give in to that idea that we can do substandard production. I go to a lot of festivals in China and I’m always disappointed that music isn’t more central. I believe the reason for it is that a) the production is subpar to what it should be or b) because the artists aren’t experienced enough on those stages to really own them. So, with the Yue festival in 2007, I took those two principles to heart with top production and bands that knew how to manipulate a 15,000 capacity arena in an outdoor park and blow the place away.

Of course, if you’re going to do that you have to charge people USD 50-100 in order not to go completely bankrupt (which we pretty much did in that first year). The choice was simple: do I put the ticket price up and bring in bigger acts that more people in China know, do I take the production down a few notches and wait for the market to catch up, or do we change the format completely?

We hit on this idea of an urban cultural festival in Beijing and Shanghai. Jue has grown organically and this year it was six or seven times bigger than the year before. We have almost half of next year’s acts booked and we have some really interesting surprises on the horizon. People will come more and more to associate those two weeks in March with a time when the two cities are really pumping.

What’s the difference between the music scenes in Beijing and Shanghai?
I think Shanghai is much more trend-based so the hot, hipster artists are generally well received there. Beijing has a much longer and deeper association with its music. Also, ironically Beijing is a bit too cool for school and you struggle to whip up the excitement you can in Shanghai. People in Beijing are more relaxed about things.

What about bands coming over here, is it necessary to brief them to prevent against moments such as the Bjork incident (caused trouble for herself with a political statement at a show in Shanghai in 2008)?
Sure, we’ve always done that. We had Sonic Youth play in Beijing and Shanghai a year before Bjork and they were probably potentially more controversial. It was important to get on the phone to these guys and explain to them that the idea of coming here and saying controversial things that then get us thrown out of the country to such a degree that we can never do anything over here again is probably not best for the long term stability of the music industry. So yeah, we pick our artists carefully and brief them before they come.

As well as Sonic Youth, you’ve brought over Faithless, Maximo Park, and the Go! Team. If you could bring anyone, who would you choose?
The list is a million miles long. Among current bands, I’ve got a ridiculous hard on for some British bands like Florence and the Machine, The xx too. Arcade Fire would be huge here.

What made you make the move over here in 2005 and what keeps you going now?
I had a really strong feeling that the West was going nowhere, I’ve worked in the music industry for over 15 years now and it is heavily saturated and limited in the West. Almost every avenue has been tried. The idea of going somewhere to be a bit experimental and try new things was for me.

To get under the surfaces of places like Wuhan, Tianjin and Beijing and see those people come to gigs and be blown away by what’s in front of them is hugely exhilarating. I can’t imagine being anywhere else.

Upcoming Split Works gigs

Tonight (Thursday, September 16) the Cave Singers rock 2 Kolegas from 9pm. RMB 50.

Ólafur Arnalds plays Yugong Yishan at 9pm on Monday, September 20. Price TBA.