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Striking a chord
Remaking NEMO and the Boston Music Awards
BY CARLY CARIOLI

When Chip Rives took over the Boston Music Awards and its counterpart convention, NEMO, last year, he had just five months to remake the event. He moved the BMA from the Orpheum to the larger, glitzier Wang Theatre. Yet by his own admission, he’d never actually been to the awards ceremony. He envisioned turning the event into "the local version of the Grammys, a red-carpet affair that’s the hottest ticket in town," as he told the Boston Herald at the time. But the 2003 ceremony, a ticketed event open to the public, didn’t turn a profit. And Rives realized what many music-industry insiders have joked about for years: the real action at the BMA doesn’t happen on stage — it goes down in the lobby, as musicians, label owners, retail moguls, producers, publicists, press hacks, and other scenesters and support staff mingle, gossip, and network. "When you walk out there [into the lobby], you realize that this is the one opportunity the Boston music industry has all year to get together," Rives now says. So this year, he’s moved the BMA to the much-smaller Avalon on Lansdowne Street (it takes place this Wednesday, September 29, with the NEMO conference and showcases following on October 1 and 2), and tickets aren’t being sold: most of the them are going to musicians and industry folk, with a smaller number being given away through radio and print outlets. The idea, he says, was to turn the event "into one big lobby experience."

Rives comes from a background in sports marketing, and with both the BMA and NEMO he’s drawing on the revenue models he learned in the sports world: the selling and managing of corporate sponsorships. "The music-conference business is not ever going to make anyone rich," he explains. "It’s hard to run." But he was confident he could bring more revenue and better marketing to the events. By slimming down the BMA ceremony and courting a wealth of new sponsors, he was able to turn it into a fundraiser for the NEMO Foundation, a new non-profit that benefits New England music charities. He’s committed, he says, to "bringing in partners that make sense: not just someone who comes in and throws around some cash, but someone who’s invested in the music community." Many of NEMO’s sponsors already have pop connections: Pepsi, Gibson guitars, Miller beer. Others are knitted into the fabric of the Boston music scene: Rounder Records, the independent record chain Newbury Comics. And Rives points to Starbucks as an ideal partnership: the company made a "large donation" to the NEMO foundation and helped select the artists for a NEMO compilation CD, which is being sold in 170 of its New England locations.

Rives hasn’t ruled out a return to a public-ticketed BMA ceremony in the future, but for this year, at least, local music audiences will have to content themselves with NEMO. "We tried to make NEMO better on all fronts," he says, citing, as he often has, Austin’s South by Southwest as the ideal to which NEMO aspires. "I’m always impressed by the way the community comes together to throw that event. And Boston is just as vibrant." One of the linchpins in his strategy has been "to get bigger bands involved — bigger national acts — which elevates the stature of the conference, and that in turn elevates the exposure the event gets, which in turn elevates the attention that the smaller indie bands get." Call it trickle-down publicity. But by working with Don Law and the local arm of Clear Channel, Rives has indeed gotten bigger-name headliners, including the Von Bondies and Melissa Auf Der Maur (October 1 at Axis), Flogging Molly (on a bill with local punk heroes the Street Dogs, October 1 at Avalon), the Black Keys (October 1 at the Paradise), Keane and the French Kicks (October 2 at Avalon), Further Seems Forever (October 2 at Axis), and Gavin DeGraw (at the October 3 closing-night party at the Roxy).

Another goal was to make NEMO more representative of the wide variety of music being made in Boston, and this year Rives points to the inclusion of two blues showcases (at Johnny D’s in Davis Square), a pair of Irish-music showcases (at the Burren, also in Davis Square), and an Americana night (at the Elks Lodge in Central Square) as evidence that the festival has broadened its appeal. "A lot of those things happened because we reached out to the community. This conference shouldn’t be my conference or my staff’s conference — it should be the community’s conference."

The NEMO showcase and conference runs October 1 and 2 at clubs in and around Boston; for details, visit www.nemoboston.com


Issue Date: September 24 - 30, 2004
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