I\'ll spend a few more minutes on this to add some clarity for you.
I\'ve been working with bands for 30 years....and The Breakfast are a tie for best group of musicians I\'ve ever worked with. The other was a great hip hop Jam band from Boston, Fat Bag. to give you an idea...memebers of Fat Bag included Sam Kineneger (of soullive and his own band), Adam Deitch (who went on to join Average White Band, John Scofield, and others) and Adam Smiens of Lettuce). They were Boston based and had family in New York....first point being that The Breakfast is from a small town by comparision. Being the biggest or best here is a big nothing. Fat Bag won three Boston Music awards, and with help from family in NYC quickly developed a following. the had very inexperienced management that signed them to a bad Universal deal.....they did one record that got no support, and they broke up, because they did not have an adequate base outside of their main territories to support the band.
Point is.....The Breakfast are building a solid base in enough markets that at some point the dots will connect. Mind you...it isn\'t easy. Even the more simple Breakfast tunes are more complex than commerial radio wants, and as much as the voices have improved, the bands sound does not easily fit into commercial radio, which is the fastest way to expose the band to more fans. So, we have to work around radio and deal with touring as a main mode of fan building. This takes longer, but as you see the fans are loyal.
As to Moe., they had the good fortune to be signed to Epic Records about five years ago, by my friend Mike Caplan. Caplan was at the time a muso at Epic....he is a fan of jam andprog., and he thought he could take Moe. mainstream. Epic probably dumped 500,000. into Moe....sold maybe 40k records. They were of course dropped, which is often a disaster for a band.
Not in Moe.\'s case, however, because the promotional boost had gotten them far enough ahead of the pack that they couls now make their own record and sell 20K.....which means essentially that you can spend 120,000 to make and market the CD. If they spent 20k on the record, they had a 100,000 buget to promote...which would hopefully come back in even more sales.
Of course, the failure of Moe. at a major teally spelled death of jam bands at majors, though some try. Caplan signed Particle for one record and I think dropped it....but Particle is a much easier band for folks to digest.
At any rate, do not think that there isn\'t a constant dialog as to how to better your favorite bands situation. Alex Defelice and I discuss issues several times a day and there are long term plans to cover all parts of the country and hopefully Europe. We constantly look for a bigger label that we could partner with, but we need more juice to make a meaningful deal. And that is what we are trying to acquire.
Now...please let this thread die and get back to enjoying the bands music, which is readily available to you all.
VS.
