AN INTERVIEW WITH JEREMY DAWSON OF SHINY TOY GUNS

When it comes to harnessing the power of the Internet and social networking sites in particular, few bands can compete with the success of Los Angeles-via-Shawnee, OK group Shiny Toy Guns. Since forming in 2002, the band has steadily earned a devoted following through a constant supply of interactive events with fans, including random shows at fans’ houses, spontaneous Myspace-engineered meet and greets and contests run by the band through their detailed web site. After signing with Universal in 2006, the group only increased their promotions and interactivity (though often independent of the label’s assistance). This isn’t a story about buying 10,000 Myspace friends through a marketing agency (Tila Tequila, I’m looking at you), but about a new paradigm that may force bands, whether they like it or not, to heavily increase their web presence past a simple Myspace account and e-mail list. We spoke to founding member Jeremy Dawson about his group’s efforts in the Band 2.0 model.

Baeble: Your band has been one of the more successful ones to harness Myspace and other social networking sites to increase your fan base. What do you hope to put on the new site?

Jeremy Dawson: We have a new system that we’re building that will be the first of its kind in the U.S. The first part is called STGNS, or Shiny Toy Guns Navigation System. There’s an antenna on my laptop to where you can literally zoom in on your computer on the roof of the restaurant that we’re eating at. You can watch us blow a tire on I-35. Every time we pass through a town that we played in, you’ll be able to click on the town and this whole page comes up showing venue, pictures, people who show up etc. All the kids can upload photos to this particular part of the navigation system and you can trace the tour back and discuss with other fans what they thought of the show.

We’re watching the whole time taking notes because there’s a 50/50 situation. It matters what we think. It matters what [fans] think. Neither one is more powerful than the other. We can find out, “That’s the wrong room. We’re not playing that room again.”

B: A recent New York Times article talked about bands that blog and immerse themselves in new technology. Two of the drawbacks they mention are losing the mysterious side that pre-Internet bands had and the fact that you always have to be “on” because you never know what blogger or message board moderator is behind you. Do these things concern you?

JD: Those are the two things that are scary. The element of mystery thing is important. You have to understand the realization that as close as you think you are to your fans, you’re really only physically being around about 5% of them. You can’t meet everyone. Still, you got bands like Mars Volta. They play a show. They’re on the bus. They don’t say hi. They don’t pass “Go.” They don’t collect $200. They don’t do contests. They don’t do meet and greets. They play a show and they walk away.

As far as always being “on,” case in point: one time, a girl I used to date and I got into a screaming match outside The Viper Room on Sunset Blvd. in front of 700 people. I got texted for two weeks about that from people in Seattle and Philly.

We had a situation where [vocalist] Carah [Faye] did a dummy vocal for a writer who was going to write for Paris Hilton. He was fired before they actually put the record together, but it leaked and I had to tell people in Lima, Peru that [Carah actually doing Paris’s vocals] is not true. It went to Comedy Central, Howard Stern, Entertainment Tonight all because of a tiny rumor that leaked to a little dot-com blog.

B: Does that frighten you?

JD: It can. You say one thing or make out with the wrong person and if somebody sees you, it is going world freakin wide.

B: How do you find the balance between connecting with your fans and keeping your anonymity?

JD: I can turn the antenna off whenever I want. It’s a difficult balance and it’s difficult to find the time to really pre-think about things that we’re doing in terms of cool marketing web stuff. There’s not enough time to think about all the stuff that could go wrong because there’s only enough time to think about how cool it is. So it’s really important that we bounce stuff off of other people so they can raise a flag like, “Maybe we can’t do that. Somebody might get hurt.”

B: Why do you think it’s so important to build an online community around your band? It seems like a very un-L.A. thing to do.

JD: Well, ½ of us are not from L.A. at all so there’s not a cold, big city vibe to anything that we do. We grew up in this tiny town [in Oklahoma] with a bunch of records, tape players, synths, guitars and 4-track machines. That’s all we had besides our crap Clear Channel radio station that played Paula Abdul and The Escape Club. There was no cable television or MTV, no cell phones, and the only thing you could do on a computer was play King’s Quest I. We just had our simple life and no one to show, teach, learn from or compete with. It was cool because we were isolated from any coastal influence or scene, which made us grow as writers and people unthwarted by anything around else, but we had to figure out how to use equipment, how to arrange and sequence etc. Y’know, you learn things the wrong way and then you figure out there’s a right way that’s 100x faster. You look back like, “Man, if I would have known that when I was 15 years old….”

I look back on that now and I know that there’s people out there that are prodigy musicians that live in Ames, IA. They have a computer and Myspace but they have no idea what’s going on or what to do and a drunk, fat mom that has no money. What I want to do is build a palette where people who’ve embraced the band have an opportunity to go learn the basic rudimentary ways of arranging and sequencing using software.

B: Is it mostly fueled by lack of opportunity when you were younger or lack of similar tools on other bands’ websites?

JD: Both. It’s something to do on a website besides look at a picture of my foot. You go to most bands’ sites and there’s a blog, mp3, merch etc. Cool. It’s great that that’s there. But why not make it a learning environment where you can share things with other people and screw around on the website for two hours, burn a CD and go play it in your car?

B: It always baffled me that bands will have their songs on Myspace and not their own site.

JD: It’s dumb because there’s a lot of people that are over Myspace or never went to Myspace or just refuse to be a part of it. The people that hear stuff on the radio on their way home go, “I’m gonna go google Shiny Toy Guns” and when you google it, more than likely the dot-com is gonna come up.

B: Do you need approval by [your label] Universal to do anything

JD: No, we do it and they scream and holler sometimes, but in general, they encourage us to be creative. Right now, though, we’re doing a contest where two people win a trip to go to Scotland. You wouldn’t believe the weeks of red tape. It was $7,000 retainer just to hire an attorney to oversee the contest. It’s simply someone flying to Scotland, watching the show, staying the night in a room and going home. A contest in reality that should’ve cost $5,000 ends up costing $26,000 ‘cause they cover every millimeter of their ass.

B: With the band’s DIY nature, it seems surprising you’re on a major at all.

JD: There’s only one reason we’re on a major. We learned, and became really good at, one of the three avenues to reaching a critical mass and reaching millions of people and that’s the avenue of the wires. The Internet. We figured that out. Cool. There’s two other ones that you can’t figure out and you can’t do anything with because you don’t have the relationships that get you in there. If we had an album that had 12 #1 pop songs we still would never get the other two: radio or TV. You can’t get in there unless you have Mr. Blah Blah at the radio department who’s known Mr. Blah Blah at Clear Channel for 25 years. You can’t just be a good band and just get on the radio. That doesn’t exist.


B: In terms of Myspace, labels and PR agencies sometimes trump up a band’s number of “friends” as a sign of the band’s success. Do you think this is an important factor and if so, how are you nurturing this?

JD: The thing with that is it’s not about how many soldiers you have, it’s about how highly trained your 300 Spartans are. That’s what matters the most. I have no idea how many friends we have and I actually don’t care. It’s the ones that are there and they’ll do anything for you and they love your record. That’s when you get the plays. We have less friends than other bands but our play factor is unusually high. It’s a loyalty and integrity factor. We publicly opposed using bots and all the quirky programs you can use to spam people into joining our friend list. You’re not gonna get anywhere with a huge army of morons.

B: There are companies now that you can pay to increase your friend list.

JD: It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. It’s destroying the integrity of peer-to-peer networking sites. 10,000 friends may have no idea what my middle name is. If you want to do that, go for it. Do it. See what happens when you put that U-haul in the back of that van and you leave your town. See if those 10,000 friends show up at your show.
How much are you trying to turn those Spartans to get them to buy the album?

B: But what if those “Spartans” are just downloading the album off a P2P site?

JD: It concerns me, but never on the surface. It’s about integrity and going the extra mile for your fans. Do you think they’re gonna think about that for a second if they have a little bit of humility? If they can go to Limewire, when they can just as easily go to iTunes, they’re gonna go to iTunes. And if they don’t, that’s their personal choice. The best way to do it is to take off all your armor and stand there and see if they shoot or not.

Visit their band on their MySpace Page HERE and their official website HERE.

- Jason Newman