It’s All Coming Together
This is the first in a series of posts by Marcato founder, Darren Gallop, about the history of Marcato Musician and how he is now using it to launch an artist's career internationally.
It has been years since I managed a tour for a band. Just three years ago, I was managing three touring bands full time, and before that I was in a band myself, constantly touring around Canada and the US. This used to be my life. I would sit in front of my computer, copying and pasting the same files to the same people, uploading audio files to FTP sites, searching through hundreds of e-mails for information that people would call to request. I would export my desktop calendar as a PDF and send it to the band, then have to change it, and send it around again, only to have them refer to the old copy and still show up late for soundcheck! I spent all of my time focused on logistics when I wanted to be focusing on growing my artist's career. I was starting to hate my job. I was starting to hate being a manager.
Hopeful for a solution to this problem, I searched the web for some kind of artist management software, something that would help me deal with this madness. There was just nothing out there that seemed to fit my needs. I settled on Basecamp, and started to use that with all my bands. It solved some of my issues, but still a lot of them remained unresolved. It was at that point that I began to dream up something that would solve all of my problems and let me focus on the parts of my job that I actually enjoyed. I didn’t exactly know where to start, and I was certainly not a computer programmer, plus I didn't have any money, so this dream wasn’t looking like much of a reality. I shared the concept with my friend Morgan Currie, a web developer who happened to play in a band I managed at the time. We began to work out the idea some more, and eventually entered the concept in an innovation contest and won some cash to start actual development.
Getting the startup money and drawing out the vision was only the beginning. As the challenges and time invested in the idea increased, I had to step down from my role as an artist manager to focus on Marcato. I had become the CEO of a software company, and this new role brought on an entire new list of responsibilities. That said, I couldn’t walk away completely. There was this one artist that I just could not let go of. She had a talent and a consistency that I just always felt would make her a star. Over the two years we built Marcato Musician and Marcato Festival, I spent evenings and weekends working with her to demo songs, set up co-writes, and build a team to help launch her career. We worked hard, we worked a lot, and we are finally getting ready to launch Carmen Townsend to the world.
After all the stressful late nights, long days, and arguments, I feel that my dream from three years ago has finally come true, and I am using it right now to tour Carmen through Australia and plan her debut release.
Stay tuned as I share my experience of launching Carmen's career internationally. I will share how I use Marcato Musician and other technologies as we cross borders and overcome obstacles, bringing Carmen's career to the next level. Today is day one of the tour. We are supposed to be halfway across the Pacific Ocean by now, en route to Sydney, Australia, but we’re stuck in Boston because our flight was late and we missed our connection. Okay, so technology can't solve all of our headaches, but it can definitely help with some of them.
