Yahoo Finance 5Q: Concert promoter Norman Perry on life after the Rolling Stones
Before we even get into it, Norman Perry wants to know if I’ve got the right guy. It seems he has a bit of a thing with names.
“When I came to Vancouver in the seventies and started my promoting career many people thought of me as a guy named Norm Perry who was a broadcaster out of Toronto and had a show there,” says the Montreal native, music industry veteran and president of Perryscope Productions – which handles merchandizing and licensing for high profile acts like Pink Floyd and the legendary music festival Woodstock. “I’d say ‘ah, no, that’s not me’ – I was the complete opposite, this 23 year-old know-it-all who was the antithesis of that other gentleman.”
He says he’s surprised anything comes up even now when he’s Googled, as he’s tried to play it “fairly low key” over the years.
But Perry is anything but low key. The music industry legend speaks in long-winded sound bites, spinning soliloquys of adages and rapid-fire name-dropping twisting in a verbal blender until it’s just thick enough to be poured out as a barely concise thought. Then he follows it up with a crystal clear answer to your question, just to see if you’re listening.
His cadence is unsurprising. Perry has spent over four decades in the schizophrenic music industry doing “everything beside writing the songs themselves” including promoting, producing and merchandizing.
He’s tied to industry greats like Live Nation Canada Chairman Riley O’Connor – who he launched the original Perryscope promotions with in the 1970s and brought bands like the Clash, Blondie and the Police to Western Canada. He moved on to promoting shows for acts like the Rolling Stones before arriving at where he is now, the world of electronic dance music festivals like TomorrowWorld.
Norman Perry shared his thoughts on how electronic dance music (EDM) festivals managed to become the next big thing while his generation was looking the other way, why slapping the Woodstock logo on a lunch pail doesn’t degrade the brand and how it feels to have someone he’s never met restart Perryscope in Vancouver.
What’s changed about the industry since the heydays when you were basically introducing a whole generation to bands like The Clash and punk music in general?
Fifteen years or so ago people decided they could steal music and it became a real problem for a lot of us and in some ways it helped magnify the importance of the live side of the business and the merchandize side of the business because certainly those revenue streams became primary as records, royalties and publishing income started to diminish.
Where are the new frontiers then? Where is the money in the music industry if records aren’t being sold?
If you think back ten years ago, folks like you in the media would ask what’s going to happen when McCartney doesn’t want to tour anymore? What’s going to happen when U2 stops touring? And we really believed bands like the Foo Fighters and Metallica were going to be as big as all these other bands so we kept saying it. But in a way I don’t know that we believed it. We were just saying it to make sure we felt good and low and behold without any of us geniuses knowing it there was this other world evolving that has now become as big or bigger than anything we worked on.
It’s the world of Swedish House Mafia and it’s the world of Tiesto and Afrojack and Diplo and Major Lazer. And I’m personally blessed to be working in that electronic dance music festival world that has become the replacement for Jethro Tull and Ozzy Osbourne – not the ultimate replacement because I think there’s room for everybody but whenever they said the sky was falling, the sky wasn’t really falling and maybe the live experience has now evolved into the festival experience.
So EDM festivals and DJs like Tiesto are the next big thing? That makes sense to me with the ten highest paid DJs pulled in a collective $268 million last year. Tiesto himself made $28 million.
Kids love these festivals. And not just EDM, look at festivals like Coachella. They’re going and they’re seeing Tom Petty for the first time ever and at the same time they’re seeing indie acts like Sleigh Bells or fun. or young up and coming electronic artists. With these DJs that are now as big or bigger than the Bonos of the world, they are capable of helping kids to discover that past and be grounded in their appreciation of music and if they’re collaborations going forward include crossovers like working with the U2s and Madonnas that’s great because I think there’s too many silos. I admire what the festivals are doing – they’re trying to marry our cultures and different music styles.
Mind you at $400 a pop the tickets to these festivals are significantly more expensive.
As promoters, we need to take a step back and say what’s really affordable for a 20 year old. Can they afford a $500 weekend? Is $900 including travel for a person driving up to Toronto from Pittsburgh affordable and is a once a year event for them the same as what I grew up with, which was seeing a band every week? It’s so easy for a DJ headliner to be on an airplane with his USB stick. He could play Alberta one night and Argentina the next night and he can be in Australia on the third night. I worry that they might be playing too often in certain markets and it gets to a point where it’s not quite as special
I fear we've now become a little bit too selective. If somebody wants to see TomorrowLand then they might not want to go to a regular venue in Toronto to just check out up and comers.
Everything you touch these days seems to be involved in the big corporate side of the music industry. Do you ever feel far removed from the Perryscope days of booking shows at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver?
We used to think The Rolling Stones were pretty big business and they were a billion dollar business. We were blessed at one point to be part of their team, some of us were working on concert promotion, others on sponsorship and some on merchandizing and licensing and it was all for this big, big entity called The Rolling Stones. Whether your partner is Labatts or your partner is Live Nation or your client is Pink Floyd, we all get used to working in very large situations. When you have an act with a global footprint you have to adapt to that international opportunity.
Is there still space for the little bands?
I don’t really work closely with a lot of young bands. But I have seen DJs that are flying up the ladder in the same way that bands used to – you hear about them from the streets. Everyone hears about it from “a guy they know.” It’s always been the kids that helped get the word out and now they can do it through social but it’s still about bragging rights.
It all comes down to the team. Any band – small or large – with a good team, goes further.
At the current Perryscope Productions, you work with a lot of clients with massive legacies like Pink Floyd or Woodstock. Aren’t you worried that putting out things like a lunch pail with their brand on it will come off like you’re trying to squeeze revenue out of the acts?
The right Woodstock lunch pail might bring you a smile if you're also the parent that would put your kid in a David Bowie t-shirt. I think that if there were Woodstock gaming tables in Vegas or pinball machines the way there are Michael Jackson ones, I think your point would be very valid but I’ve been really lucky to be able to know or have clients that steer me away from bad deals and staff that keep me sane and credible when it comes to honouring a brand’s legacy. The insane thing that I think about everyday is people pay us for the privilege of saying “I’m into Pink Floyd”, whereas companies like Proctor and Gamble pay for the privilege of sticking an image in front of the public.
Do you find big music acts also seem to be really cashing in on the VIP element, those back stage meet and greets, lately?
With the VIP experience, I don’t think you can say Bon Jovi stole the idea from Wimbledon or the U.S. Open where these types of experiences have been happening for years. The way to keep the ticket prices low is to have the rich pay for what they can afford, it’s called a private suite, it’s called valet parking and it allows all the bands that have a conscience to be able to keep the majority of their prices affordable.
You’ve got Perryscope in the U.S. now but Dave Fortune, a former employee at the Perryscope you launched in 1977, seems to have revitalized the initial brand in B.C., how do you feel about that?
I’ve always been very proud of the team I’ve worked with and by no means did I actually even deserve to have a company called Perryscope, it should have just been Concert Promotions or something. But for whatever reason when it all started it was a bit of a visual pun and we went with it. And about a year and a half ago it came to my attention that somebody who had for a nanosecond, at least in my brain, worked for our organization in Vancouver, had reclaimed the name.
I see how that could be weird.
Apparently they did it for the right reasons – promoting had become very corporate and big business was ruining everything and wouldn’t it be good to try to revisit the good ol’ days when promoters did try to engage with their audience on a one to one basis and did try to connect them to the up and coming music of the day. Which is one of the reasons it was so successful in the first place. The reality is that there were alumni of that company that have gone on to be some of the most important people in the industry of entertainment specifically live entertainment and if any of them had come to me I would have given them my blessing. I thought his approach was kind disingenuous. Still, I wish him well.
