You Must Go and Win: Essays by Alina Simone

proceeded, over the course of the next hour, to explain how everything worked.

    By the time Lea was done, I felt as though every song I’d ever loved, every band I’d ever worshipped, every bit of musical lore I’d ever stumbled upon and repeated was not a matter of personal taste or an act of free will, but the result of a successful campaign waged by beautifully coiffed people who moved purposefully from desk to desk in this spacious aerie with cell phones pressed to their ears.
    “But I don’t understand why it matters whether I send a press kit or Shellac sends it …”
    “Because then our name is on the envelope,” Lea replied briskly, “and it gets opened. People know we’re selective. We’re the gatekeepers—not the only ones, but one of them. Labels know we have influence, that’s why they hire us.”
    “Is that how Lisa Cane got those great opening slots?”
    “We have relationships with some of the better bookers around town. They know that if they include a band on our roster, their show will get a lot of press. When a slot opens up, they call.”
    My head was spinning.
    “And … so … how much does all that cost?”
    “It depends. There’s a range.” Then Lea mentioned a few of my favorite indie bands and told me their labels had kept Shellac on retainer for as long as eighteen months, easily spending tens of thousands of dollars to promote a single release.
    “Well, can you … would you mind giving me the low end?” I asked.
    Then Lea leaned forward and gave me her number. And I couldn’t help it—I giggled.
    I walked out of Shellac’s offices that day feeling as though I’d just disembarked from the mothership onto a planet that looked very much like Earth, but was subject to completely different laws of gravity. I had always assumed that there was only one way to “make it” and that was to keep grinding your way through the
club circuit until one day the right person happened to be in the room. I had really never considered that money could help lubricate the process.
    Once I started keeping my ear to the ground, I found no shortage of stories. I heard about bands renting out venues themselves and booking nationally known acts just to guarantee themselves an opening slot, bands who bought up all the tickets to their own shows, then slapped “sold out” posters all over the city, bands who spent a small fortune branding themselves as the next big thing with videos and merch and tricked-out tour vans, bands who hired Shellac before they even released their first EP. All the bands I’d ever played in had done everything themselves—silkscreening posters, booking tours, writing press releases. But Shellac’s roster included the kinds of bands I’d always assumed were totally DIY as well: punk bands, garage bands, Riot Grrrls, metalheads. Thus enlightened, I found it hard to go back to my old ways. The Wednesday-night gig at Bar B on the Lower East Side and the featured-performer slot at the Ristra Lounge Open Mic Night in Hoboken lost whatever luster they once had. And living with Sarah only made things worse. By week two we’d settled into a routine. She would come home from something fabulous—a sold-out show at the Bowery Ballroom, a private party sponsored by Ray-Ban, a meet-and-greet with some Rolling Stone journalist—breathless with the day’s successes. Her client had just gotten selected for an Urban Outfitters compilation, her client was performing live on Conan next week, her client had just landed a profile in the L.A. Times … and on it went. I would listen to the flood of good news with a growing sense of unease. Sufficiently recovered from my trauma with the children, I had started looking for a new label again. Only this time it was considerably less easy. My leads had long since dried up. The A list had given way to the B list, and now the names of labels I was contacting read like an exotic-heirloom-seed catalogue.
    “So did you reach out to anyone new