The Making of a Band | Videos & Demos on the Road | Signing with Capitol

“At the end of every show we’d grab handfuls of these stickers we made at Kinko’s with our name and website,” says Steriogram frontman Brad Carter. “We’d toss ’em to our fans from the stage, 300 or 400 stickers every night.”

Carter laughs at the band’s ultra-humble approach to building fan loyalty. But it’s working. Steriogram’s homemade stickers, website and music videos, together with its enthusiastic courting of street teams and high school kids, helped launch the rock-hiphop group from obscurity in Auckland, NZ, to a major deal with Capitol Records. “Our goal was to play in America because our favourite bands live here,” says Carter.

The members of Steriogram - Tyson Kennedy on vocals, Tim Youngson on guitar, Jake Adams on bass, Jared Wrennall on drums and Carter on vocals and guitar - have an instinctive feel for guerilla marketing and the tools that make them potent salesmen of their own sound. They’re self-confessed geeks who take their Macs everywhere, reach for them constantly and use them for everything. “Our life is on the Mac,” says Carter.

High School Cafeterias

Steriogram earned a loyal following by seeking out young fans on their home turf: school. “We came up with this idea to play at high schools,” explains Carter. “It was a good audience for us, because we were Quotestill quite young - one guy was only 17 and the rest of us were 20 or 21.”

But the no-pay, high-mileage gigs weren’t easy to score. “Principals don’t usually want rock bands in their schools,” laughs Carter. “So the way we got in was to offer free music clinics. We’d teach the kids about the music industry: how to write songs, how to get their songs on the radio, the ABCs of starting a band and so on. All we asked them in return was to let us play at lunch time.”

The investment paid off. “It was a huge success,” says Carter. “We played at 75 high schools all across New Zealand, a different one every day, with 300 to 1,000 kids in each school. And we started to build fan base.”

Enlisting Street Teams
Energetic and shrewd as the young bandmates are, they invite - and sustain - genuinely friendly relationships with their fans. “Since the day we started our website, we have personally replied to almost every email we’ve received,” says Carter. “And we’ve been getting 60 to 100 a day, so that gets kind of crazy when we’re touring and playing shows.”

How do they do it? “Everyone in the band has a PowerBook with Entourage,” says Carter. “So as soon as we get to a town we go to Starbucks or somewhere with high-speed Internet hot spots. We log on and split up the mail between the five of us, and we reply to everything. We get people who say, ‘I never thought I’d hear from you guys again!’ They’re amazed that we take the time. But we know that the personal touch makes them more of a fan, and they want to work even harder for us.”

The website helps Steriogram enlist the cadres of fans who evangelize their music. “People sign up to get our email newsletter or join our street teams,” says Carter. “They go around giving out free CDs for us. And when we have a record or a concert coming up, they spread the word - it’s like an army!” The site also invites fans to submit their own guerilla marketing ideas. “They write us about what they want to do for us,” says Carter. “They come up with all sorts of wacky things.”

Mates from Auckland
With its street teams on the march, Steriogram’s momentum grew. The mates from Auckland self-released their first single, “Soccerstar,” which gained immediate exposure when it was used by New Zealand’s national soccer team for a TV commercial. Then came their second release, “White Trash.” Says Carter, “We had our hair in mullets for the video, and it took off on New Zealand TV.”

That was a watershed for the band - at least, at home. “When we wrote “White Trash” I don’t think any of us knew what we were getting ourselves into,” says Carter. “The song and the video pretty much changed the nature of Steriogram and opened up a lot of new pathways for the band.”

After seeing how much attention Tyson Kennedy received for his impromptu rapping on the single, the band took him off drums, brought him up front as a vocalist, hired Jared Wrennall as the new drummer, became a five-piece group, and began writing more hip-hop songs. The new sound defined Steriogram, and the band was invited to play the New Zealand leg of the Australian Big Day Out festival.

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